HALF
by Bellephont17
Summary: <html><head></head>I feel a gate opening. I don't know where, but  it's opening. And I know it has something to do with the dead things that have been showing up on our freaking doorstep. That, and the attempts on Niko's life . . .</html>
1. Seven herrings

_A/N: This is an AU fan fiction which takes place between Moonshine and Madhouse. If your corrections have something to do with the books after that – please do not tell me as I have not read them yet! I will be properly ashamed of myself when I find out for myself, don't worry. Lol _

**ONE **

"**Seven herring . . ."**

Worms. Not the kind you dig out of the flowerbed and slide onto a fishing hook. The kind with the spidery wings and the poisonous breath and the single secret vulnerable spot in the snake-like bodysuit of scaly armor. Not fish bate. Not friendly. And definitely not something I'd want to see in my flowerbed.

Worms – also known as dragons to all those mythologically-degenerate suckers (including me) who got their perception of fantasy from Disney films while crapping their diapers – aren't far up the cryptozoological timetable. Apparently they were walking the earth with the Auphe and the trolls, the first dinosaurs. And guess frigging what? They're still damn walking. Not that I would have believed it unless Promise had flipped me the blood-spattered Polaroid a late photographer with aspirations took of the thing's head. Not big, really, considering what we'd dealt with in the past. Maybe the size of a Lincoln Continental. But damn if it wasn't deadly-looking. It wasn't ugly. I shuddered. It was like Darkling in that way – strangely, felinely beautiful, but one blink at the wrong moment and you'd think it was a lot less pretty with your entrails hanging out from between its teeth.

Something that was dangerously close to happening at this very moment.

I watched as the worm – Lambton, Niko called him – slithered sibilantly down the side of the building toward the alley in which Niko and I were currently camped out. Lambton clung to the side of the brick building like a gecko. One damn creepy gecko. He had wings, but they looked to be little or no use to him. They were tiny flaps of baby-pink skin stretched between claw-like pinions that fluttered delicately with every gust of wind. But Lamby had teeth to make up for it, and the smell of its fetid breath was already lacing the air with paranormal toxins.

"Worms have soft underbellies," Niko hissed at me, his sword at the ready.

"Great. What should we do, ask him to sit up and beg so we get a clear run?"

"If we weren't in so much trouble right now . . ." My older brother left that particular threat unfinished, not for effect, but because Lamby chose that moment to spring across the alley to land, suction-like, on the building we had our backs to. Right frigging above us.

"Shit," I gasped, wrenching away from the wall. And it sure smelled like it. The hot gusts of breath hissing from that gaping maw wasn't fiery – thank God for another error in human fantasy – but it was poisonous. Inhale too much of that stuff and you fall asleep and wake up inside a lake of roiling gastric juices. Which was why we had masks on. Run-of-the-mill surgeons' face masks, but even that couldn't stop the smell from penetrating my overly-sensitive nostrils.

Lamby opened his huge mouth even wider and let out a roar that sprayed both of us with ropes of yellow spittle. Nik stayed still, refusing to budge under the creature's gaze, as his jacket started smoking with the poisonous saliva. I brushed myself off quickly, pissed at the singe marks that now spattered my clothes like demonic tie-dye. Pissed enough to take several potshots with my trusty Glock at its slick head. Which, damn it all, remained slick and in one piece. Not so much as a dent in the chassis.

Apparently unfazed, Lamby cascaded off the wall and into the alley until he crouched right in front of us. "Now." Nik's word was barely a whisper, but it took barely a second for us to act on it. Rushing on either side of Lamby's big head, I grabbed a hold of the wing – ugh, clammy – and levered myself onto the worm's even clammier back.

Jamming the muzzle of my gun just under the worm's head, I pumped a full round into where the brain should have been. I knew it wasn't going to make much of an impact. Hell, it wasn't going to even hurt the thing, but that wasn't the plan. The plan was for me to make a big enough distraction so that dear old Lamby forgot about Nik long enough to rear up on his scrawny hind legs and give my brother's shiny katana a clear view of that gloriously scale-free portion of underbelly.

Lamby just squatted there, unworried, letting a long pale tongue flick up to wet his eyeballs. I glanced down at Nik, who, concealed in the shadows, gave a slight shrug and mimed my gun going off a second time. I complied, emptying yet another round of bullets against the nape of the beast's frigging neck. His left wing fluttered a bit, much as a person's eyelid would flick if you aimed a blow at their face.

Well, he was taking this stoically. Many things I had imagined when Promise had first told us there was the equivalent to a dragon lurking in downtown New York, but this thing was practically comatose. Niko gave a grunt from his place in the shadows. What, was he mad at _me_?

"Okay, Lamb chop, time to be a good gecko and fight like a monster," I crooned as I slide along the long, thick neck and onto the worm's flat, bony head. Whipping my knife from my back pocket, I jammed it deeply into Lamby's cat eye. Or tried to. The congealed orb of hideous light had such a thick layer of whatever was coating it that my blade bounced right off. But it left a scratch along the beast's retina, and while it might not have been lethal, something like that is difficult to ignore. Even for Lambton the laconic.

With a screech, the worm threw its head back and bucked. I held on for dear life, fingers cut by the ridge of scales over each eye that I clung to. Lamby's head connected with the side of the building, and so did I.

"Damn it," I gasped, feeling my whole back go black and blue instantly.

Hissing, Lamby fell back to earth and began to shake its head back and forth, trying to dislodge me. Yeah, couldn't I be just a hell of a nuisance if I tried? Once more my knife came down, scratching away a significant piece of whatever protects dragon eyes. Lamby obliged this time, rearing up on his hind legs. I took the opportunity to let go and slide down the spiny back – much like a waterslide – with a painful landing and the possibility of being decapitated by a violently thrashing tail. I hit the concrete at an awkward angle but rolled with it, rolled right into a pile of garbage cans.

Nik drew his sword back and thrust it into the conspicuous white patch on the worm's belly. Black blood spurted, spreading like a miniature lake across the asphalt. Niko, who was covered in it, sprang backward to avoid the lolling head of the beast. It came rather close to me, breathing its last whiff of acidic breath directly into my face.

"Shit," I gasped for the second time, once more appropriately. This time because I realized that sometime during my struggle and escape from the back of the raging beast, my face mask had slipped and my surroundings were now going blurry around the edges.

"Well," Niko sounded pleased with himself. "That went relatively smoothly. For once we kill a monster and it stays dead. Refreshing."

An attempt at an answer resulted in a choked wheeze that would have put a drunken fachan to shame. I felt as though my shirt collar was suddenly several sizes too small. I clawed at it, attempting to loosen the stranglehold my clothes suddenly had on my neck. "Nik . . ." I rasped.

"Your mask is gone," Niko observed.

_You don't say_, I thought spitefully. _How about you quit being Sherlock freaking Holmes and help me breathe? _

A hand went around my bicep and hauled me to my feet. My legs buckled and I nearly went down again. "Damn . . ." I hissed, black spots floating in front of me like a horde of malignant Hameh birds. Was there any other kind of Hameh bird?

"Calm down, it's not fatal," Niko said, steering me from the alley and into the waiting car. "We'll get you home and you can sleep it off."

"I can't . . . breathe . . ." I gasped.

"Oh." Diverting from his path to the passenger's seat, Niko leaned me up against the front of the car so my stomach was draped over the hood. "Okay, wait a minute." There was the sound of ripping cloth at my neck and the feeling of suffocation lessened slightly. Then, pressing the heel of one hand under my left rib and ramming it into me violently several times, Niko performed some kind of Heimlich maneuver on my bruised back. It hurt like hell, but it helped, and I could breathe again.

"That's great," I managed, before the poison blacked me out.


	2. A Present

_A/N: Okay, and this is where the real plot begins! I just had to include that first chapter because I love the boys in action and they had yet to fight a dragon (or at least they haven't yet – I'm not done with the series). I sincerely hope that someday I'll get to hear Rob's version of the dragon fight! Anyway, enjoy :D _

**TWO**

**A Present**

I woke up slowly, sensing by the turns and the bumping of the car's tires over the familiar potholes that we were nearing the apartment. Only when I tried moving did I notice that Niko's hand was gripping my knee.

"Whassat for?" I slurred, my question morphing into a yawn halfway out of my mouth.

"You were thrashing," Niko said, giving me a small, hard tap on the kneecap and then removing his hand so he could drive with both. "Just making sure you weren't going to fall out the passenger window."

I was silent. Thrashing. Didn't sound like me. Usually when I slept, I slept like a log, like a rock, like the damn dead. Usually Niko had to pry me out of bed with a crowbar or set lit matches to my toes to pull me out of the deep depths of unconsciousness. Of course, worm venom breath might have upset me a little. Thrashing, though . . . nope, didn't sound like me.

"What were you dreaming about?" Niko asked, eyes on the road.

"Nothing," I said, then winced at how it sounded like I was covering something up. It was an honest answer, though. I didn't remember any dreams.

"You were saying a name," Niko pressed. "Over and over."

As far as I was aware, I only ever said one name in my sleep, besides those of holy entities I grunted in vain from time to time. I only knew I said my brother's name in my sleep because said brother had a tendency to bring it up at the most disparaging times.

"Yeah, yeah, Cyrano. Sure. Rub it in. I need you like hell. I dote upon you like a damn suckling at its mother's . . ."

"It wasn't my name."

I paused to think about this for a moment. "Huh." _Could it have been George? _I wondered. But I decided not to voice that. Not only would it bring back painful memories – the idea of mewling a long lost love in my sleep was too damn pathetic to voice. "You care to tell me who I was calling? Please don't tell me it was 'Mommy'."

It was only a slight increase in pressure, but I noticed instantly as Niko's hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter at that rather poor choice of jokes. It really wasn't fair for me to play it up like that, Nik had had to deal with her just as much as I had had to. Longer. Niko had lived with Sophia until he had been able to go to college – eighteen years. For me, it was only fourteen. Not that I had exactly gone on a vacation to Bermuda during my absence. I suppressed a shudder and focused on Nik, who, I realized, had neglected to tell me exactly whose name I had been calling.

"Oh shit," I gasped, suddenly extremely nervous. "Tell me it wasn't Robin."

Niko let a short breath escape his nose, his equivalent of a belly laugh. "No, I'm glad I can relieve your mind. It was not Goodfellow's name." He sobered, turning the car into a side street that led up to the back of the building that was our current home. Or haunt. I still disliked using the word "home" in relation to anything. It felt uncomfortable, like I was trespassing somehow. A really warm coat that didn't belong to me.

I sighed as I realized that once again, Niko had avoided my question. "Do you want me to _drag _it out of you? Get down on my knees and beg? Kiss your ass – what?"

"I don't know the name you were saying, Cal. That's just it. 'N' something."

"Hmm. Now who do I know whose name starts with the letter 'N'?" I tapped my chin in mock thought.

"It wasn't my name," Niko insisted. "I know my own name, little brother, as much as your opinion of my brain capacity begs to defer." He put on the brake and switched off the headlights, then dragged the key from the ignition and slipped it into his jacket pocket. One of his many jacket pockets. Niko loved pockets. "Let's get you into bed."

I yawned. Bed sounded amazing right now. I sat up straighter and unbuckled my seatbelt. As I swung my arm in a concentrated arc, I felt all the muscles in my back twinge in protest, and then begin to throb dully. That smash up against the wall was taking its toll. "Damn it."

"What?"

"My back hurts. Damn inchworm dealt me one good." I winced and rolled my shoulders. "Sleeping in the cramped car didn't help either."

"I should have brought a bed and put it in the back for your personal comfiture," Niko said dryly, getting out of the driver's side and coming around to my side as I opened the passenger's door. "You know, you are getting to sound more like Goodfellow every day."

"Shut up. You may wipe the floor with my ass, you may run me shitless around Washington Square Park, you may poison me with grass juice, but you may _never _call me Goodfell . . . ow." I had attempted to get out of the car, but my knees apparently were still in dreamland. Niko caught me by the jacket lapels before I collapsed face first on the tarmac, knees buckled under me.

"_That _is why I came around this side of the car," he grunted, hefting me into a standing position and twisting into position so he could get one of my arms over his shoulders and help me through the back entrance. "Worm poison doesn't work off quite that fast. The brain, being the most active part of the body besides the heart, is the first to work off the aftereffects of the venom. Lower and less-used parts of the anatomy which get less blood circulation . . ."

I drifted off into thought, as far away from Niko's "teacher voice" as I could. I was calling someone's name. Someone whose name started with "N". I struggled in vain to try and come up with another person I knew – besides my brother – who had a name that started with that particular letter. I couldn't. Not for the life of me. Robin, Promise, George, Delilah, Isaiah . . . I tried to think up a couple more. Damn, I didn't really know a lot of people, did I? And technically speaking, only one of those people even qualified as "people".

". . . that's the only way to keep your toes from falling off."

That snapped me back to attention. "What?"

"You mean you weren't listening to me?" Niko didn't look at me as he wedged us through the doorway and slammed the door with his free hand. He didn't have to – the innocent surprise in his voice got the message across. "I said you need to exercise all parts of your body to get the blood flowing so it will work the venom out of your system. Otherwise you might lose a couple of digits."

I began furiously wiggling my toes in my shoes, trying to ascertain if I still had all ten members attached to the rest of me. I was pretty certain I would have noticed a loose toe rolling around under the arch of my sneaker, but try to feel every one of your toes while not looking at them. It isn't the easiest thing to do in the world.

Halfway up the back staircase, I could feel the strength seeping back into my deprived kneecaps and pushed away from Niko. I was practically twenty-one, and I had absolutely no desire to be dragged around by my brother unless I absolutely needed it. It was degrading.

"You're alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." I tried to hide the hand I braced against the wall, but of course, Niko being Niko, he saw it anyway. And then, Niko being Niko, he decided to accept my judgment and not mention it.

We finally got up to our apartment's floor. Pushing the door open, Niko went first and looked quickly around, down both hallways, hand hovering over one of his aforesaid many pockets. Looking for monsters, looking for Auphe, looking for anything and everything that might hurt me. Shit, all this love got suffocating sometimes.

I pushed past him. "If you're done making sure Mr. Arnold isn't going on a midnight prowl to the bathroom . . ."

Niko sighed in brotherly exasperation – probably the most consistent form of communication we had going – and let the door swing shut as he caught up to me. "You know, Cal, one of these days I think I'm just going to stop attempting to beat caution into your sorry little brain."

"I'm cautious," I objected, striding toward our door with the anticipation of bed heavy behind my eyes. "I'm damn cautious. I'm so cautious I don't go to the bathroom without checking behind the toilet to make sure there isn't a gate opening somewhere . . ."

I stopped talking because I noticed something stuck in the doorway, between the door itself and the lintel. Whipping out the LED penlight I kept on my keychain, I shone it at the thing. It looked almost like a fat, reaching hand. A wide center with long plump prongs – five of them.

"Well, isn't this sweet," I muttered. "Someone left us a present."

"Don't touch it."

Even from here I could smell it. It wasn't pleasant. It smelled cold and clammy and sickly sweet like the first whiff of rot. I didn't like it. I reached out and plucked it out of our door regardless. "Shit!"

I let go of the thick, spongy petal but it hung onto the pads of my fingers, a hundred tiny barbs sticking into my skin and drawing blood. I could see the flower petal pulsing gently as it sucked the blood right from my fingers. I could feel my hand going numb and tingly. I shook my hand but it hung on like a damn leech. Dropping the penlight, I tried to pull it off without actually touching it.

"Niko," I said with mock calmness as I turned to my brother. "A flower is trying to drink me. Can I trouble you to do something about it?"

Niko, who had been busy unlocking the door, pushed it open and dragged me inside. "I _told _you not to _touch _it." Flipping on the overhead light, he led me to the kitchen and grabbed a pair of tongs he used for plucking boiled vegetables out of pots while making his evil simmering concoctions. "Hand over the sink."

I obeyed, thoroughly freaked. The flower was a sickly purple color, I could see now, and the stench was even worse now that it was growing fat and bloated with my blood. My fingers were going purple. Niko gripped the end of the flower with the tongs and yanked it, hard. I bit my lip as the homicidal plant was ripped from my skin.

As my brother jammed it down the garbage disposal and shredded it into a thousand tiny pieces, I ran my shredded fingertips under the hot water, trying to massage some life back into them. "_Damn, _what _was_ that thing?"

"Exhibit A in the case against your professed cautiousness." Niko dumped the tongs in the sink and shut the faucet off. "Let me see that."

My hand was almost back to its regular color again, and the blood had stopped to a slow ooze from the hundred or so tiny incisions, beading my fingertips like grotesque red dew. It stung a little, but not worse than getting a cut while shaving. No big deal. Except for the concept of it. A freaking plant tried to drink my damn blood. That was enough to make it bad as hell. Sure, I'd faced the Auphe, the Kin, Sawney, even Darkling. But this – "It was a flower! A damn freaking flower! Flowers weren't supposed to do that!"

"You think it was poisoned?"

"No, believe me, everything was going _into _the damn thing, not out of it," I muttered, withdrawing my wet hand from Niko's and dabbing the blood off on a wad of paper towels. "So. Believe it or not, I'm still totally dead. So I'll see you in the morning, Cyrano."

I was talking to thin air, however, because Niko had brushed past me and stalked to the front door again. I tagged along despite the call of my bed, curious as to what he thought he was going to find. The giver of that particular sweetheart? I doubted it.

"I thought I saw something." Niko swung the door open all the way back into the room and stared hard at the paneling over the handle. "Look at this."

I'd seen my own name more times than I could count. Hell, it was even in the damn classical literature course I had to take in eighth grade – Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. But never, not _ever_, did the sight of it freak me out as much as it did now. The letters were long and angular, carved jaggedly and awkwardly with what looked like a chisel into the wood of the door's panel. It looked like one of the freaking titles for a shitty horror film from the '60s.

I moaned gently and slapped the heel of my good hand on my forehead. "Just what I need. A stalker. Who sends me flowers. Awesome. Now I'm going to bed."


	3. The Smell of Midnight

**THREE**

**The Smell of Midnight **

I'd never told Niko about the dreams. There was no reason to; I wasn't some stupid kid who believed telling Mommy would chase away the nightmares. There wasn't anything Niko could do about them but worry, and he did enough of that as it was. So I kept them to myself, and dealt with them when they came, and showered the sweat from my hair before coming out of the bedroom in the morning.

They always started the same, in the dark. I was on my stomach, I could feel the stone under my belly and against my chest, and grazing my back and shoulders. The feeling of tons rock on all sides and the crushing blackness made it difficult to breathe properly. I knew there was something in the tunnel with me, something that was going to grab me by the ankle and drag me back, back to . . . what? Hell, I had no idea. But whatever it is was _bad_.

And it was going to _hurt_.

I wished I could move silently, but with the chains around my ankles, that was difficult to do. The links of searing metal slid and jangled along the uneven rock floor, chiming out merrily and coldly that I was getting away. _Damn it. _

A cold, foul-smelling wind ripped down the passageway, into my face, and it smelled like death. My death. Whispers ran along the slime-dripping crevices in the wall, calling me back to where I had been. _Bastards_, I think, clawing my way along the damp floor and feeling puddles of who-knows-what coating my bare abdomen. Rocks graze my torso and cut it. I'll have a million bruises when I got out of here . . . _if_. Don't lie, Cal, I told myself. It isn't when, it's if.

And then I heard them behind me, over the rattling of my own chains. The scrabbling, the click of long nails and the patter of flapping hands and feet echoing up the tunnel, it made the darkness seem like thick water I had to swim through. I wasn't going fast enough. They were getting closer. I didn't know who the hell they were, but they were getting closer.

_Shit_, I thought vehemently. _There I go, lying to myself again . . . _

Of course I knew who they were. They were the same creatures that had been tailing me for as long as I could remember. The Auphe. Damn albino bastards. They weren't going to catch me, not this time. _This _time, I was going to escape. There was someone waiting for me at the other end of the tunnel, someone that would make everything alright again . . . if I could get there. I could feel the warmth and the steady promise of help and safety radiating somewhere in the darkness beyond, like a light I couldn't see. It kept me moving.

My hands were bleeding from dragging my dead weight along the sharp rocky floor. My muscles were aching from the odd position, my arms shaking with the strain of maneuvering myself in this awkward position. The scrabbling grew fainter.

And suddenly it was in front of me, grinning with its damn huge mouth full of teeth that were long enough to jut out and cover its bottom lip in a fan of metal needles. Its glowing red pupils illuminated the white skin around its eyes and the spidery strands of hair that floated around its narrow, evil little face.

I screamed and sat up in bed, sweat plastering the sheets to my chest and back, my hair practically standing on end. Gasping in shuddering breaths, I sat up and rubbed the last cobwebs of sleep from my eyes. I was shaking, shaking uncontrollably, my body vibrating with thrumming thrills of terror.

"Shit," I muttered shakily. "Shit, shit, shit."

Hands gripping handfuls of blanket into tight, sweat-soaked knots, I sent my eyes spinning around the room as I struggled to get oxygen back into my body by way of huge gulps of air. At last, when I was calming down enough to stop vibrating like a damn hummingbird and realizing that there were no Auphe hiding in my overflowing hamper, I allowed myself to relax.

Which is when it hit me.

Something was wrong. Yeah, no surprises there. When was anything not? No, really wrong, not just after-a-nightmare wrong. Damn something-else-is-in-the-freaking-house wrong. A gate was opening. I could feel it, the pull at my own gut, the sudden tingling urge to form one myself, the way you can't help but yawn when you see someone else yawning. A gate was opening . . . in the damn house.

Jumping up from my bed and nearly toppling as my legs tangled in the sheets, I stood with one hand gripping the dresser, and focused on it. Closing my eyes, I sensed the familiar headache, and the energy radiating from under my bedroom door as certainly as a light turned on in the kitchen would have. Where was it coming from? I brought a hand up to my forehead and squeezed, trying to wring the answer out. What room?

And then it hit me like a revenant punching me in the gut – clammy and cold and damn hard. Niko's room. Diving back toward my bed, I flung the pillow off the mattress and scrabbled in the bedclothes for the knife I slept with. Finally closing my hand around the rubber hilt, I slammed my door open and thundered down the small stretch of corridor separating our rooms.

Niko's door swung open easily – too easily. Damn it. Doors always swung open easily and silently right before you realized there wasn't anyone in the room anymore. When there _was _someone in the room, doors were a bitch to open. You shoved and kicked and had to break the door down, you didn't turn the handle, swing it wide, and walk right in.

But that's what I did. That's what I freaking did.

Niko was lying in bed, asleep. He was snoring through that grand nose of his, so I knew instantly that he wasn't dead. Sliding into position by the bed, I stood there and scanned the room for that gray rip in reality that signaled a gate. But even as I stood there, knife in my hand, ready for battle, I sensed the foreboding begin to fade away. It drizzled down my consciousness like the last drops of rain on a windblown windshield, and then it was gone altogether.

I allowed my shoulders to slump with relief, then tucked the knife out of sight as Niko stirred comfortably and muttered something into his pillow. "_Promise_." So Niko called names in his sleep as well. I smirked. Now I'd have something to bitch him about.

He said it again. "_Promise._" But it wasn't the name I thought it had been, after all, I realized as I listened closer. It was "_Promised_."

Promised what?

He tossed again, less comfortably this time, his face twisted and his shorn blond hair falling into his face. I flicked his bare shoulder gently to calm him down, and he collapsed into a deeper – and louder – sleep than before.

It looked like we all had our nightmares. "Night, Cyrano," I muttered, and went back to the door.

I was halfway through the doorway when I felt the wind on the back of my still-sweaty neck. I turned quickly, looking for the source of the draft. The window was open. Niko never left the window open. Blame the lack of appreciation of the smell of midnight on too much fresh air in a carni-kid's childhood, sleeping under the stars night upon night while Sophia made out with paying customers inside the trailer. Anyhow, Niko appreciated stale inside air in his bedroom. And he _never _left the damn window open.

Then what the hell did?

I went over and peered out into the flashing, bright night of New York, searching for something to give me a clue as to the answer. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Shit. I shut the window and fastened it firmly, giving the lock a withering look to keep it shut. No more freaking magic tricks.

Then I went to back to bed.

But I didn't sleep. I kept waiting for a call for help from the room across from mine.

In the morning, Niko gave me hell about the bags under my eyes. "I thought you told me you were dead last night," he muttered, depositing a plateful of yellow fluffy stuff in front of me. "I do not appreciate you depriving yourself of a good night's sleep. You stumbling around like a zombie doesn't make my life any easier."

I took a bite of the sorry excuse for breakfast food, just to give me an excuse not to talk. Niko called them eggs and I called them shit and they tasted like plastic. I gagged them down with a glass of cranberry juice.

"Do I have to run you around the park before bed every night to ensure the proper hours' rest?" Niko threatened, cutting himself a small piece of the sorry excuse for an omelet.

"No," I grouched. In the light of morning, I wasn't even certain what happened last night had been real or my overworked after-nightmare imagination. In fact, I was betting on the latter, simply because how many Auphe would open a gate in my brother's room, open the window, and leave – without inflicting the least bit of damage? Not many. Not any, in fact, I was willing to bet. Therefore, using the logic that Niko so valued, I induced that it had to have been me.

Still, that didn't explain away the bags under my eyes. Or, for that matter, did it explain away the agitated feeling that was roiling in my gut and stopping me from eating the semblance of eggs staring me in the face. Much as I hated Niko's vegan concoctions, I ate them . . . usually. Today, I couldn't manage anything. I stifled a yawn and let my head fall against the edge of the table.

"So now you are starving yourself as well?"

"You got it. I'm ending the miserable life that is mine," I quipped, head still resting on the table.

"Not while I have anything to say about it," Niko kicked my knee and my leg went numb down to my ankle. "Eat. Or I'll sit on you and force-feed you. Or would you rather we played airplanes?"

I grumbled, sitting up, and stamped feeling back into my leg. "You working today?" I wondered, taking a sip of juice in hopes it would satisfy him. It didn't. He eyed me and then my plate meaningfully. Damn, when would he stop being such a grandma? I was twenty years old, I didn't need someone monitoring my eating habits.

"I'm teaching at the dojo in . . ." he glanced down at his watch, ". . . half an hour. Speaking of, I'm going to take a shower. If I come back and that plate isn't clean . . ." Niko left before finishing his threat, but I had no doubt it entailed said plate being shoved up my ass.

I sat at the table, staring at his empty place and wondering what would have happened last night, if there really had been a gate, and Niko had gone through it. It would have been just like this. I would have been sitting here at the table, staring at his damn empty seat. Well, not exactly true. I wouldn't have this disgusting heap of protein imposter squatting in front of me.

I doused the whole thing in ketchup, hoping it would cover the taste, and forced myself to take a couple of bites. _It didn't happen_, I reminded myself, hearing the shower go on in the small bathroom between our rooms. _It never happened, Niko is right in the next room. _

_ It could have happened_. That would be my damn pessimistic side, definitely the stronger of my two halves. Maybe the Auphe half. _You could have been too late to do anything about it. And who are you trying to kid? That window was not your imagination. The Auphe love windows. _

I shuddered, remembering the time dear old dad had pulled me through one. I wondered if I would have sat on Niko's bed for two days, waiting for him to come back. But then I realized that with me, the Auphe had a purpose. They wanted to "convert" me, and they had gone through two years of torture attempting to make me do what they wanted. With Niko, they wouldn't have any such purpose. The only thing they'd want with him was killing him. Even if I had waited, he wouldn't have come back.

I looked down at my eggs and the ketchup was suddenly blood. "Damn," I hissed, coming back from my reverie. "Damn it, Cal. Cut it out." I got up and scraped my plateful of bloody eggs into the garbage disposal. Niko would get his wish, my plate would be empty.


	4. A New Set Of Rules

**FOUR**

**A New Set Of Rules**

Niko gave me the eye. "Do mine eyes deceive me or do you actually have your shoes on?"

I stuck a sneakered foot out and waggled it. "Your eyes are lying bastards, Cyrano. These are house slippers."

"And you have them on – why?" Niko asked as he shrugged into his leather coat, then slung his duffle bag containing his work-out set and a pair of small hatchets over his shoulder. The hatchets were for precautionary reasons. My brother never heard of pepper spray. To him, mace was an actual mace. Complete with ball and chain.

"Didn't you read the memo on the calendar?" I quipped, slipping into my own jacket. "It's Bring Your Little Brother To Work Day."

Niko stared at me with hooded eyes, leaning up against the door post. I ignored him as I zipped up and straightened my collar, then ran a hand through my damp hair. Nothing like grooming if you want to look inconspicuous. I prayed he wouldn't guess the real reason why I wanted to go with him. I was scared shitless something was going to happen and I wasn't going to be there. I had made up my mind in the kitchen that until I could prove to myself one way or the other that what I had felt and seen last night was a dream, I was returning the favor of ass-saver.

"Well, are we going or what? I don't want you to be late for class."

"What's wrong."

"Huh? Wrong? Nothing."

He was still staring, damn it.

"I just thought it would be cool to see where you work and all that. Considering I've never actually been there, I think it's about time, right? Right." Great. I was babbling. I never babbled – no, scratch that, I always babbled. But usually it was while I was complaining about something or other. I never babbled _nonsense_. If that wouldn't tip Niko off, I don't know what would.

Niko, however, decided not to push it. Instead, sighing heavily, he unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway, eyeing the name inscribed above the handle. "We're going to have to fix that somehow. I have a feeling our present landlord isn't going to enjoy this rather primal form of graffiti."

"We can pick up a can of paint or something on the way back from the jodo," I piped nonchalantly, brushing past my brother, careful to avoid looking at my name in the door. It creeped me out. One more piece of proof that what I had experienced last night was real.

"Dojo," Niko said.

"What?"

"It's called a dojo, not a jodo, unless you mean judo, which is a form of martial arts and not a practicing facility." At least, that's what most people would have heard coming from Niko's lips. Me? I heard, "Cal, why are you insisting on tagging along with me when I know all you want to do on Saturdays is watch bad television? And don't think I noticed the way you avoided looking at the word on the door."

"Shut up," I said, to both versions of that particular sentence.

Several hours later, I was regretting even _thinking_ about Niko's welfare. Getting up from my sprawling position on the white mat, I grunted several obscenities as I felt the bruises begin to swell. Niko was standing slightly away from me, in a tank and loose, flowing pants, short hair pulled back in a stub of a ponytail, eyes happier than I'd seen them in days. Dragging my ass around the dojo in front of a large crowd seemed to have a positive effect on his mood issues – I'd have to remember that the next time he was grumpy.

"That, class," he said in his best teacher voice, "is exactly what a properly executed combination-arts routine is supposed to do to a would-be assailant." He raised an eyebrow at me, and his next words were for them and for me. "Let that be a lesson to you."

"Shit," I spat, and stalked off the mats toward the shower room, opening the white karate shirt some kid had loaned me and allowing the blasting air conditioner to evaporate the sweat on my chest. I should have known better than to try to babysit my brother, especially in such a dangerous environment. Throughout the whole duration of the lesson, I had been frequently called upon to participate, and by participation I mean incapacitation. Incapacitation at the apartment was one thing. Incapacitation in front of a crowd of students who oohed and ahhed over my every tumble was something else.

I knew Niko was doing it to get back at me for being so secretive and stubborn. It bugged him when he didn't know everything going on inside my head, especially if he suspected that lack of knowledge would result in a jeopardizing situation.

I pushed through the door to where lockers and benches piled high with people's discarded changes of clothes, and stripped down to my boxers, searching for the clothes I came in. Finding them stuffed in a wad in the corner, I limped towards them and picked up my crumpled jeans. Something fell out of them and landed with a soft thud on my foot.

Once again uttering that beautiful "S" word that was such a contingent part of my vocabulary, I jumped away from the thing and rubbed my foot with the other to rid it of the horrible slimy dead feeling.

The bird was dead, wings crumpled in broken heaps next to its limp little body. I crept back, nose wrinkled at the faint stink of decay, and squatted before it. It was fascinating in a morbid way – its little neck had been broken, the head twisted all the way around. The eyes were a cloudy white, the beak was gaping, revealing tiny teeth. Teeth, shit it. It's body wasn't feathered, I realized, reaching out with a forefinger and stroking the still bird's breast. It was scaled. Tiny slick scales like snakeskin covered it.

What the hell? What the freaking hell?

I wiped my finger on the ground and kicked the dead thing under the bench, then quickly got dressed.

Once Niko and I were walking back to the apartment – yes, walking, damn it, after what I had been through for the past four hours – I broached the subject. "So. You have anything in those precious mythology books of yours on scaly birds?"

"I might," Niko said casually. Then, just as casually, "Why?"

"My mystery stalker strikes again," I grunted, digging my hands into my pockets. "There was a dead bird wadded up in my clothes. It had scales and teeth. Teeth, shit it, Niko. Its neck was . . ." I made a twisting motion in the air with my hands, like I was uncapping a bottle, accompanying it with a sharp snapping noise.

"Where is it?"

"Back at the dojo place. I kicked it under the bench." I hadn't wanted anyone else to see it. I had enough problems without having to explain away a preternatural bird to a bunch of gaping idiots. Maybe a maintenance man would find it and get a million dollars donating it to science. Here's hoping someone got something good out of it. It sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

I noticed something suddenly, something not many other people would have. Niko's step had changed. While before he had been going along with a kind of easy swagger, now his steps were firmer, they hit the ground harder, and his back was straighter. He was staring straight ahead, jaw set.

"What's wrong?"

"Something's following us," Niko said gently, quietly, out of the side of his mouth. His hand was going to one of his pockets.

"Damn," I muttered, my own hand immediately reaching for my gun's grip. "What?"

"Don't know. I can't see it, I can only feel it. Hear it moving. Can you . . ." He flared his nostrils slightly to indicate his meaning.

Despite what someone might think, it was I – and not the beak-nosed Cyrano – who had the excellent sense of smell. Thanks to my Auphe heritage. Some people got X-ray vision, others got invisibility, and others got the power to climb the walls like damn spiders. Me? I got super-smell. Hooray for me, the short end of the stick, as usual.

I sniffed the air, concentrating. Werewolves had been here recently, marking their territory, but the urinal scent was stale and – while that didn't make it any less pleasant – it ascertained that it wasn't what was following us. There was the hint of revenant stink, but only slightly, lacing the air filled with human BO and feces. However, there was something else – something sharper and colder – I knew it instantly.

"Auphe," I grated.

"How many?"

"Damn, Cyrano, I can't _count _with my nose."

"Alright, alright," he muttered, and the knife was flashing in his hand. He kept it concealed under his coat for the benefit of the happily oblivious passersby, but I could tell he was ready to whip it out at a moment's need. He fell back to walk behind me.

Which was completely stupid. They didn't want _me,_ not this time. They had promised that they would make me suffer before the end, by taking everyone who meant anything to me. _That _was their plan. So for once I was the one they didn't want, and Niko was the target. I dropped back myself, falling behind him.

"What are you doing?"

"Keeping your ass safe," I muttered. "You remember their promise. They're not after me, this time, big brother. They're after you."

"However, unlike you, I can take care of myself."

_God, I hope_, I thought grimly. "Humor me, will you? Just stay in front of me this once, Nik."

"I'm hardly . . ."

"_Nik_."

Niko fell back so we were walking shoulder to shoulder. "Care to compromise?" he queried grimly. "Let's just make it to the apartment. We don't even know if it's planning to attack."

"Since when do the Auphe plan to do anything but?" I wondered out loud.

As fate would have it, however, the Auphe – however many of them had been tailing us – did not attack. They didn't even make themselves visible. They simply got close enough to allow us to be aware of them, and then disappeared once we reached the apartment door. I hated it. At least last time you could be sure where you stood – if they found you, they tried to kill you, and you fought back or died. Simple rules. Now, it looked like there was a whole new set of rules.

"They're being cautious," Niko said as I drew up a kitchen chair to the table and rested my face on my folded arms. "They remember what happened to the others and they're nervous. Nervous is always good, Cal, it gives us the upper hand."

"Yeah, like, we're not _nervous _or anything," I muttered into my arms. "Nik, they aren't being cautious," I lifted my head and rested my chin on my stacked elbows. "They're being clever. They're playing cat and mouse with us and I hate it. Why don't they just come right out and try to attack like last time?"

Niko sat in front of me with a mug of steaming tea. He took a sip and then rolled the hot mug between his calloused palms. "I don't know," he frowned. "I wish I did, Cal, but I don't. Maybe we should lie low for a few days."

I agreed. Lying low – especially the lying bit – sounded extremely good right then. I was tired as hell – last night's sleeplessness and then today's action and suspense had me dead. Yes, lying low seemed like a good idea. It was not, however, to be acted out. We didn't get the chance.

Robin called only moments later, and he wasn't happy. Not one freaking bit.


	5. Tea Party

_A/N: Wow, Robin was difficult to get right. Lol Hope I have not disgraced the gloriousness that is Goodfellow at all! _

**FIVE**

**Tea Party**

Niko had his cell on speakerphone, so I could hear every loud, crude, and audibly crippling word from our favorite puck's very practiced lips. After several moments of obscene ranting, Niko cut him off. "Goodfellow, much as I enjoy being on the receiving end of your very colorful if obscure monologue, would you mind stopping long enough to actually tell us what happened?"

Very literate, my brother. Nearly on par with Robin himself – minus the cursing of a drunken sailor. "Yeah, Robin, cut the lip-wagging or I'll come down there and really give you something to bitch about." Myself, not as literate. But it was adequate. Robin Goodfellow stopped talking – a feat in and of itself.

"I'll tell you what happened, you pair of overdeveloped Neanderthals," Robin spat into the speaker. "One of Caliban's twice-removed came to visit me, courtesy of a gate right through my new damn plasma TV. Much more convenient than subway travel, don't you think? Cheaper, too, for him at least, the pasty-assed bastard. . ."

As Robin ranted on and on, Niko and I looked at each other. Not in shock, or horror – to hell with those futile, helpless emotions. With determination. So – the Auphe were really back, then. And it they had just paid Loman a visit.

"Are you hurt?" Niko asked, already donning the jacket he had just taken off.

"Not bodily," Robin growled. "Mentally and emotionally, however, I am mortally wounded. Do you _know _how much a plasma TV costs? I know the idea of currency is a foreign concept to you two hoodlums, but have you any conception? Not only that – the heartless, foul-faced beast shitted on my carpet."

"We're coming over."

"So I can weep upon your shoulder at the unfairness of life?"

"Just shut the hell up, Loman, and get ready for a grilling." Yelling at Robin helped me calm down, a bit. I tried to conceal how ill-prepared I was for this new game. Once again, the Auphe had had the opportunity to kill and had passed it up in favor of appearing and vanishing without a sound. Hopefully not without a trace.

I glanced over at Niko, who was navigating his way through a pile of old dusty books to find a throwing knife he had left on the counter. No, I thought grimly, watching him slide the blade into the sheath wrapped around his forearm. Never without a trace.

Between my nose and Niko's know-how, we'd track them down.

The journey to Goodfellow's passed in tense silence. Despite the opportunity for a good run down to Chelsea, Niko passed it up and opted for the car, for which I blessed his ass. It was, actually, really only strategy. I'd be no good to Robin or Niko if I arrived at Goodfellow's apartment a wobbling, gasping, jelly-kneed wreck I always was after our daily runs.

Robin opened the door to us. I had to do a double-take when I caught sight of him. Usually, whenever we entered his humble abode, he was dressed with the rich slovenliness of a lazy-assed prince, complete with silk robe and velvet house slippers. Today, he had apparently just gotten back from work. He was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt. An undone tie was slung around his neck and hung under his unbuttoned collar, and his hair still shone slick with the grease he used to keep the wild brown curls under control. The only other time I had the privilege of catching Robin Goodfellow in such boringly mundane apparel was the first time I had ever met him – at his used car lot. Now, except for the wild green eyes that shone with an unnaturally bright sentience, he practically bordered on human. Albeit visibly shaken and haunted.

"What are you looking at?" he snapped, and pushed the door open wider to beckon us in. "If you are going to proceed with what you call _grilling_, then lets get it over with so I can recover and nurse at Bacchus's inebriating suckle."

Niko raised an eyebrow, and I could see the wish to pass comment flit through his eyes before he thought better of it. Smart move. We made our way through the immense foyer and into the opulent living area. The plasma TV was spilling its innards onto the floor, poor thing. I grieved, truly. Niko knelt by the pile of bloody Auphe refuse.

"Shit, you're not going to touch it," I gurgled as he reached his hand out.

He gave me a longsuffering look, and then pinched something from the stinking, festering molehill of crap. He waggled his find in the air, raising an eyebrow, apparently unfazed by the concept of what he had just done. "Apparently human food doesn't agree with the Auphe system."

Human food. Despite my disgust, I edged closer to the treacherous pile and took a better look at what dangled from Niko's slender, soiled fingers. A pickle slice. Like what you'd find on a damn . . . "Hamburger?" I mouthed, disbelieving.

"Apparently so," Niko grimaced.

"Since when do the Auphe visit the drive-thru at Mc-friggin-Donalds?"

"I don't know, but whatever the reason, I'm sure our Auphe friend is regretting it. Used to unpolluted meat from thousands of years ago, it's not hard to imagine what that chemically-enhanced grease did to its unsuspecting internal system."

"Hell, Nik, you sound almost _sorry_ for the damn thing."

"Simply sorry I wasn't there to witness its suffering," Niko grimaced. "An Auphe with indigestion, now that's something I'd like to see."

"Wonderful," Robin snorted from behind us. "The thing gets a craving for fast food and then decides to use _my living room _as a restroom facility! Does this place _look _like a _bathroom _to _you_?"

"Uh . . ." I couldn't help it. The word "bathroom" was nothing farther from one's mind when one walked into Robin's living room, but the situation was just too opportune to pass up. Besides, Robin had on more than one occasion told an un-truth for the sake of effect. Said effect usually involving the cringing of even practically amoral persons such as myself.

Robin aimed a kick at me, but ended the roundhouse motion with another slug from the bottle that had magically appeared in his fist. "Now," he gulped, "I fear you have some questioning to do."

Niko stood up and dropped the pickle back on the ground, ignoring Robin's overtly annoyed look. "First, I must beg the use of your facilities."

"In there," Robin motioned his hand to a door farther down the hall. I winced in anticipation of a crude offer that was sure to follow anything involving Niko and privacy being used in the same sentence. The remark did not come, however, and even though I was relieved, I couldn't help wondering if Robin was a little more shaken up than he let on. Since when was he the kind of person to let an opportunity like _that _go? Hell, he hadn't even waved as it passed by.

"What's going on here, Loman, what's got you so shaken up?" I edged closer to the puck, whose brow was now wrinkled in thought. "So you saw an Auphe and it shitted your carpet. You're alive, and it doesn't look like you had to fight much to stay that way."

"Maybe that's what's making me so nervous then," grimaced Robin. "Why in hell am I _not _covered with the bloody price of victory? Why would it simply gate here and then gate away?"

"They've been doing that a lot, lately," I muttered darkly. "It's their new game. Cat and mouse."

"I am _never_ a mouse," Robin looked indignant. "I have played many such games in my lifetime, but let me tell you, I was _always _the cat. Mice always get the short end of the stick. _My _mice, on the other hand . . ."

I rammed the heel of my hand into his shoulder to stop him before he launched on another reminiscent bout of orgiastic storytelling.

"Anyway, I refuse to be a mouse," Robin muttered, going back to his bottle. "Wait till Niko gets back, and I'll relay the conversation."

I blinked. "You had a damn conversation with it?" Hell, the only other person that had ever come close to that type of interaction with an Auphe had been Darkling. "What did you do, ask about the weather? Exchange pleasantries? Discuss the color of your victims' internal organs?"

Robin's hand was shaking, the bottle sloshing silently in the bottle. I stopped ribbing him. I remembered I once watched a drunk Goodfellow rise from the barstool to a standing position while keeping the amber brandy as still as glass in the tumbler. The fact that his liquid fire was shuddering now was not a good sign.

Niko came out of the bathroom, wiping his hand on his pants.

"What took you so long?" I demanded.

"I couldn't find the sink," he said matter-of-factly. "That bathroom is as large as most people's kitchens. Now, Goodfellow, we will sit down and we will talk." He took Robin by the arm and steered him toward a large couch, plopping him down and sitting across from him. "What did the Auphe want."

"He said he talked to it, Nik," I said.

Niko nodded. "I assumed as much. Obviously it wanted information, not bloodshed, or your new cleaning lady might have been cleaning up a lot more than droppings."

Damn, why couldn't I be that stoic? More importantly, why didn't I see that? Of course the Auphe would not gate into Robin's house simply to use it as a litter box. And apparently it hadn't been hungry, either. For an Auphe, that's a very large feat of self-restraint. Pucks were probably as flavorful as the green olive in the bottom of a martini glass. Albeit ones with lethal fighting abilities and a sword to go with the pimento.

Our personal green olive concentrated on balancing the bottle on one knee as he talked. "It said it wanted to talk. I, of course, told it to go to hell, but I didn't choose to emphasize my suggestion with a sword through its ass."

"Why not?" I demanded. It would have been my first course of action.

"I figured it wanted something, and of course whenever I have the pleasure of seeing an Auphe it immediately brings to mind a pair of obtuse yet lovable fetuses that have, on more than one occasion, backed me up in the face of gravest peril. Therefore, I reasoned that if I could talk to it as it requested, painful though it would be for me, I would see what I could find out. There. At once brilliantly deductive and heroically self-sacrificing, aren't I simply the most glorious creature to grace this frugal earth?"

"Obtuse yet loveable fetuses," Niko rolled the term of affection around on his tongue. "I'm touched."

Robin smirked, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "It was particularly hard to get anything out of it, or even understand it, for that matter. Three word sentences, no articles whatsoever. Auphe intellects are about the size of rats', and not likely to grow anymore."

Huh. Thanks, Goodfellow, old pal. Never mind a half-Auphe is sitting within three feet of you, here at your beck and call to save your sorry ass. I shifted position slightly. Niko, I could see from the corner of my eye, went a little straighter and raised his eyebrow a fraction.

Robin realized what he had said and bit his lips together before blowing them out again. "Damn it. Sorry, Caliban. You're . . . so _human_ I keep forgetting you are even related to them." Nice try at recompense. It didn't kick it, but it would have to do. I had to grow up and be a big boy despite insults. The situation was too serious.

I waved it away and pressed him to continue. He did so, obviously feeling better about the whole thing now that he had a chance to tell someone about it. "It said it had – and forgive me if I do not quote directly, the poor grammar would sully my tongue – come out of the past looking for someone. Knowing of course who it was talking about, I did not bother to ask. It told me anyway. It asked me about Caliban."

"What in hell could it want to know about me? They just gate and find me, like always."

"Not this one. It didn't ask _where _you were, so I am assuming it already knows. It asked _how _you were."

"_How _he was," Niko demanded. "That doesn't make sense."

"Are you sure you two weren't discussing this over tea and crumpets?" I joked to keep the rattled feeling hidden from the others. Why would the Auphe care about _how _I was?

"And then?" Niko prodded.

"I told him you were peachy, thanks for asking, how are you? And then I went for him with the poker, my sword being at the cleaners at the moment. What do you _think _I did? I tried to lob its head off. It then promptly loosed its bowels and gated away."

"That's it?"

"Every last damn thing," Robin threw his head back to drain the bottle. "And while you're here, would you mind very much if I asked you to remove the Auphe feces from the premises? My cleaning lady just left and I don't have her phone number . . . yet."


	6. Blinker

_A/N: Okay, deal with me, this chapter is rather A/U because apparently Cal has not learned to drive yet. Now, I know he can but it made good writing. So – yeah. Big deal. As Cal would say: "Bite me". Enjoy and pretend you don't know better ;P_

**SIX**

**Blinker**

Robin declined the offer we extended, saying that he would rather die nobly in his own abode than eek out a skulking existence in the mildewed bathroom cupboard we called our domicile. Or something to that effect. Whatever his exact words, the answer was still no, he wouldn't come with us. Probably it was better that way, anyway. Obviously he wasn't high on the Auphe hit list, or that pile of preternatural shit wouldn't have been the only thing staining the expensive shag.

Niko slid into the passenger's seat of our car, buckling in before I could so much as open my mouth. "I think it's about time," he told me calmly, then tipped his chin at the steering wheel, indicating that he wanted me to get behind it.

Yeah, so bite me, I was twenty but I had yet to obtain my drivers license. I had one, sure, stuffed into a cheap imitation leather wallet, alongside with all my other phony ID cards. But I had yet to _earn_ it. Hell, most people in New York City don't own cars – except for the obscenely rich like Robin and Promise – and Niko and I weren't exactly rolling in money. Most of the past four years we hadn't even had a car, doing a lot of our traveling on foot or hitchhiking (Niko had sold his old Jeep very early on in our run-away-from-the-Grendels stage to pay for motels and cheap restaurants and other necessities). So yeah, I had yet to learn to drive. Big shit.

Why Niko was determined to teach me now, all of a sudden, was all too clear. He hadn't said it, but he didn't need to. He wanted to make sure that in the rather improbable occasion that the Auphe got to him and I had to run by myself, I knew how to handle a car.

Clearing my throat nervously, I slid into the driver's seat. I had seen Niko operate this monster – or one of its distant cousins – a hundred times. This was the steering wheel, that was the ignition. You put the key in, twisted, and slammed on the accelerator. And the car went . . . backwards. I jammed my foot on the brake as Niko reached over and slapped the gearshift out of reverse.

"Heh," I muttered, scratching the back of my neck, my foot still firmly on the brake.

"Ease it up," Niko instructed, one hand on the steering wheel beside my own clenched fist. He helped me navigate out of the parallel parking space in front of the Chelsea apartment building and into the street. "Blinker."

"Uh . . ." I glanced at the array of controls. Damn, driving didn't look this complicated when Niko did it.

Niko, silent on the subject of my confused ignorance, pointed out the correct lever and repeated the word. "Blinker."

"Blinker," I said stiffly, and engaged said blinking light.

"Now," Niko said, glancing over his shoulder at the oncoming crawl of cars. "We're going to merge into the traffic. Wait for an opening."

My hands were clenching the wheel tightly, resenting the fact that he had dumped this responsibility on me. Shit, our lives were literally in my hands. Pathetically ill-equipped hands at that. If I made one false move, we could be dead. Niko could be dead. The passenger's seat was called the suicide seat, after all. Damn, if this was the crushing weight of responsibility that my brother felt every day of our lives, I suddenly took back every wish I had ever made upon a smoggy star or a dripping birthday candle to be him.

"I don't want to do this right now, Nik," I muttered. How on earth could I face werewolves and revenants without batting an eyelash while this blanket of winking metal had me sweating.

"There's an opening coming up."

"Couldn't we just go to some empty lot somewhere and cruise for the first time, huh?"

"Eyes on the road, Cal."

"Shit."

"Now. Merge." Niko tugged on the wheel, and I slammed on the accelerator, praying. We slid into the space like the missing piece of a puzzle. I grinned as Nik gave a nod of approval. "Very good."

"Now what?"

"Just coast with the traffic. Pump the brake, tap the accelerator. Not much to it. Keep generally this distance from the car in front of you, and keep your eyes on the rearview mirror to make sure no one is riding up your ass." His fingers stayed lightly on the steering wheel, but otherwise he left the driving up to me.

Once I got over my unmanly moment of panic, it was actually really fun. The car responded to my every touch, my every wish was its command. I jerked the steering wheel oh-so-gently to the left and the car leapt to obey my hands. I felt the urge to purr "Good car", but that would have been beyond corny so I commended it mentally and left it at that.

"You're swerving," Niko brought my attention back to reality.

"Oh. Sorry." The euphoria of being in control had gotten a little out of hand. I concentrated on keeping a straight line and a steady pace. "So. What do you think that was all about?"

"I don't know," Niko admitted as I took a turn onto a slightly less busy street. "Hamburger pickles and strange questions. Curiouser and curiouser." The adopted English accent had to mean he was quoting something, but I didn't really care at the moment.

What I _did _care about, however, was the revenant had suddenly broken from the crowd on the brightly-lit curb and run into the street, directly in front of our car. It was dressed in a red hooded sweatshirt, but I could see the mockery of dead flesh peeking out from under the shadow of the hood. It stared straight at me, and in the split second before impact, I got the jitters. I knew it _wanted _me to hit it.

Niko shouted at me to brake, but my first reaction was to jerk the steering wheel to the left to swerve around the damn thing. This I did, ramming right into oncoming traffic.

"Shit!" hardly covered it, but it was the only thing that escaped from my mouth before the jarring impact of another car sideswiped us and sending us into a screaming spin. My head snapped back at an odd angle, the seatbelt going tight against my chest as I was pitched forward. Steering wheels are harder than they seem while cradled loosely in your curled fingers, and the seatbelt did nothing to soften the blow, even if it did keep me from going through the windshield.

Our car skidded onto the far side of the street and up against the curb, shuddered violently as the passenger's side slammed into a lamppost, and I blacked out, the raucous of screeching metal, shattering glass, skidding tires, and honking horns still echoing in my ears.

It must have only been seconds later that I woke up. The police hadn't arrived at the scene of the accident yet, but I thought I could hear the echo of sirens below the usual vicious zoom of traffic. Damn it. My neck hurt, and my head was throbbing like crazy. I was finding it difficult to focus, my vision going in and out, fuzzy and clear.

"Killer headache tomorrow," I muttered, but at least I was still alive and breathing. Then I realized that no way we were sticking around to give the cops the pleasure of questioning us. Our ID wasn't up to the challenge tonight. Neither was I. I looked down to unbuckle my seatbelt, and caught sight of Niko's limp hand propped up against my leg.

Shit, Niko. I hadn't even . . . I must have been hit harder than I thought. How could I have just forgotten like that? Starting at the hand, I let my eyes slide up the leather clad arm to my brother's face. His hair was full of broken shards of glass – the passenger's window had imploded. He was unconscious. Oh, God, how I hoped he was unconscious.

"Nik," I glanced over at the street. Several people were coming cautiously across the two lane street to investigate to make sure we weren't dead. The revenant had disappeared. I had to get us out of here before they detained us for the damn police. Shoving the car door open, I hopped out and staggered around the hood to the passenger's side, reaching through the broken window to pop the lock.

"Come on, Cyrano," I muttered, hands shaking as I pulled the door open and undid his seatbelt, my eyes all the while on the people picking up their pace to get to us. No way. No damn way. There was a dribble of blood running down his temple and catching in the blond stubble dusting his jaw. "You really gotta get up now."

He was limp in my arms as I yanked him from his seat, the broken glass pooling in his lap shattering into tinier fragments on the pavement. _Oh, God, I killed him_, I thought desperately, feeling the dead weight straining my muscles. _I killed my brother. _

He shifted, and I thought I'd burst with relief. "Cal . . ." he muttered, eyelids fluttering like hummingbird wings. I wished I could give him time for a leisurely wakeup, but there really wasn't any damn time at all. There were definitely sirens, I could hear them now, and the people were nearly halfway across the street. Some were yelling at me, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.

"Come on, get up, Cyrano, we're in trouble."

"Auphe," he grunted, struggling out of my arms and into a precarious standing position. I was damn glad it wasn't the Auphe or they would have taken us instantly. I grasped Niko's hand as it was reaching under his coat for his sword.

"Not Auphe. Police. Just as bad almost, so let's scram."

Niko shook his head, clearing the cobwebs. He winced and touched his fingers to the gash in his head. "What happened?"

"No time, talk later," I gripped his arm and pulled him into an alley, even as the people began to run toward us, shouting for us to stop. Yeah, they ran, but we ran faster. They hadn't hauled ass five laps around Washington Square Park every day. I had, and not for nothing. Maybe I couldn't beat Niko at a footrace, but I sure as hell could outrun these particular pedestrians.

Niko was dashing alongside me as fast as he ever had been, and although he could have outdistanced me easily, he was visibly keeping back to stay a little behind me. Running right now was hell. Not only were my legs shaking so much I could barely cut a straight line down the dark pavement, but my head had not ceased throbbing, and the accelerated blood circulation in my head was beating the devil's march through my cranium.

Niko didn't look so hot, either, I noticed, shooting him a backwards glance. The cut in his head was emitting only a slow ooze of blood, but his face was drawn and I could guess he had as bad of a headache or worse than I did. I wondered if his vision was going in and out as well.

_But he's not dead_, I reminded myself. _He isn't freaking dead. _He could have been, and the guilt of that fact slid around like a dead fish in the pit of my stomach. I clenched my fists until my nails bit into the heels of my hands. _He could have been, he could. Have. Been. _

Then, to keep my thoughts from wandering down that particular path in case it led to a ledge I'd fall off of, I began to think of the revenant. What on earth had possessed it to walk right in front of the car? What in hell?


	7. Another Nightmare

_A/N: The last chapter was particularly difficult for me to write, because I have had a similar experience just recently. *shudders* All I could think while I was driving home to bear the ill news to my parents was "Gosh, I hope my dad will be as understanding as Niko would be if Cal got into an accident!" lol He was pretty awesome about it, actually. Wish granted. _

_Also, I just finished Deathwish and I promise I had absolutely no idea that they got into a car accident! I was up till one in the morning reading and oh my gosh. Oh. My. Gosh. There ain't no other word for it. _

**SEVEN**

**Another Nightmare**

"A revenant?" Niko muttered, leaning against the apartment's kitchen counter with a damp washcloth pressed against his temple. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle, which was good. My head, on the other hand, still hurt like hell, which wasn't so good. But I sat there with the ice pack and didn't say a word about it. Hell, if this was the price for my stupidity half an hour ago, so be it. I could deal.

"In a damn red sweatshirt. Niko," I shifted in my seat and leaned forward, one arm propped on the table. "He _wanted _me to hit him. I know they're stupid and all, yeah, but shit, Niko, he looked right up at me and grinned like he was . . . _waiting _for it."

"Or waiting for you to swerve," Niko amended.

"Why would a revenant want us in a car accident? _How _did it know we were even there? Was it waiting for us?" I rubbed my forehead, trying to squash the pulsing veins into painless obedience. No such luck. I sighed. "I'm sorry, Nik. I _told _you I had no frigging idea what I was doing. If I'd just listened and _braked _the damn thing . . ."

"Instinct takes over," Niko blotted his forehead and then pulled the cloth away and frowned at it. Then he folded it with meticulous exactness and placed a clean white pad to his face.

"Yeah," I said grimly. "Hell, I spend my whole life fighting _against _my instincts, I should be better at the business by now." The ice was making the headache worse, so I took the pack off and placed my hand against it to warm the frozen spot back up. The pain eased some, then was back in full force again. "Damn." My eyes drooped. Man, I was tired.

"You're not going to sleep tonight," Niko told me firmly. One shoulder up to hold the rag in place, he began opening the kitchen cabinets. "Where's the flashlight?"

"Above the sink," I said. "Why?"

Niko retrieved it and came over to me. "Ok, open your eyes wide."

They did that on their own without me having to think about it, simply because I was confused. "Wha . . ." And then the light blasted my retinas and I swore, pushing back my chair. Niko held onto me by my bangs. Neither of which helped my head.

"Calm down. Skittish."

"You'd be skittish too if someone stuck a million watts of light through your brain while you've got a killer headache, Nik."

"I'm checking for a concussion. And guess what? You've got one." He switched off the flashlight and straightened.

I dropped my head into my hands. "Frigging brilliant." It _felt _like it.

"So – you are not going to bed tonight."

"But I'm _tired_ . . ."

"Your not allowed to sleep while you've got a concussion. You're not tired anyway, it's just your brain jumping into automatic shut-down mode to deal with the damage."

"Then let it deal," I whined. The prospect of another ten hours of dark wakefulness hurt worse than the headache.

"Go watch TV."

"No." If there was one thing I didn't need right now . . .

"Cal, go watch TV."

Grumbling, I got out of my seat and winced as the headache blossomed all over again. There was no arguing with Niko in that tone of voice. "I am _so _displeased with you at this moment," I growled, stalking into the dark – blissfully dark – living area. I slumped on the couch with absolutely no intention of turning the TV on, but the overhead light was switched on with blasting blindness, the television set powered up and set to maximum volume, and the remote dropped in my lap.

"This is killing me," I howled, cradling my head in both hands.

"I shall mourn you when you are dust. Now watch," Niko jabbed a finger at the set and stalked out of the room. "Ham or peanut butter? I know it can't be watercress."

The thought of eating a sandwich made me want to throw up, but I didn't feel like yelling for him not to bother over the roar of the TV, so I let him go.

Niko came back and sat beside me, handing across a plate of peanut butter and jelly on wholegrain. For all Nik's prowess as a fighter, he made one shitty sandwich. Oozing globs of jam drizzled down the crusts and brown peanut paste was swirled all around the plate. I squinted over at him. "How is it you know how to handle a katana and not a butter knife?" I asked innocently, and then prayed he would remember not to cuff me on the head.

He remembered, choosing instead to pull my ponytail.

"Hey, that felt good, do that again."

"Eat your sandwich," he ordered, giving my hair another softer yank, then another. "And for your information, I made that sandwich look so horrible on purpose so you would get the general idea as to what it does to your digestive system." He hooked his fingers into my hair and tugged this way and that, alleviating tension, freeing pressure points, whatever. It felt damn good, that's all I cared about.

I glanced down at the bread and quirked my lips into a half-grin. It had been cut in half. One half had been cut into squares, and one of the squares had been cut into triangles. A rectangle, square, and two triangles. Shit, how did he _remember _that stuff? It'd been, what, thirteen years since I'd asked for my sandwiches cut like that? And this for the guy who'd practically sent his ass to the afterlife just over an hour ago.

"You are weird," I grunted, deciding maybe I was kind of hungry. I downed a triangle. It was gone in one bite, much faster than it had been when I was seven. "I just almost killed us both back there and you make me a sandwich."

"And I know that there is absolutely nothing better one could possibly do than make you food," he said, and the tug was a little harder this time. "But honestly, the way I look at it, it was me who plopped your ass in the driver's seat."

There he went, taking the responsibility again. How did he stand all that responsibility? One of these days he'd burst, I was sure. Just go stark raving mad with responsibility. I hoped silently that one of these days I'd be able to be responsible for him – just once.

In the end I'd ended up sleeping anyway, face smashed against the arm of the couch. I didn't remember falling asleep in the morning, but I'd obviously survived it. I'd come out with battle wounds – a killer crick in the neck and a faded yet still apparent headache – but I'd survived. Niko left a note taped to the TV, saying he'd be working at the dojo and would be back around four. He also told me get a feather duster and blah, blah, blah.

I went back to bed.

And woke up screaming bloody hell several hours later. It had been the dream again, that bloody hell dream. The dark passage, the rocks under me and above me, blood on my hands as I scrabbled for holds and cracked my nails, the length of chain weighing my legs down, cutting off blood circulation, clattering along behind me and giving me away no matter how much I prayed for it to be quiet. And then the scrabble of many feet, and the grin staring me in the face.

The story had continued this time – lucky me, I got to watch the extended version. The Auphe face whistled through its teeth. Said my name.

"Caliban."

"Go away," I had croaked, pleading mentally that it wouldn't attack me because in this tiny little passageway with my belly pressed against the ground and my shoulders brushed on either side by stone walls, I wouldn't be able to fight. I'd have to lie down and take it, like I had so many times before. Not this time, I begged. Not this time.

"Caliban, you will come with me."

"Never," I gasped. There was that light at the other end of the tunnel. That blissfully warm and safe spot that I couldn't let go of. But every word of crushed glass from that creature's mouth and it seemed the light was getting farther and farther away, slipping from my grasp. And the damn thing wouldn't stop talking.

"You will," it said. "Come, baby Auphe. Pupa, Auphe larva, come. They will wrap you in your nest again. Your cocoon."

I remembered that, that stinking gauzy substance they wrapped you in. It didn't look it, but it was stronger than iron chains and it could hold you still while they stuck you and drank your blood like frigging insects. Like you were a damn pina colada. Not enough to kill you, but enough to take away your strength, make it impossible to run away. Not like that had stopped me . . . The warmth at the other end of the tunnel was calling me.

"Go to hell, Auphe," I hissed at it.

The Auphe giggled, a high-pitched keen that set my teeth on edge and made my eyes water. "Already am, Caliban. Already are, you and me. Me and you."

Its words echoed in my head as I woke up, flinging my blanket off of me and bolting to my feet, knife miraculously unsheathed and ready in my hand. I hadn't even remembered pulling it from under my pillow. "You and me," I whispered frantically as I looked around the room to make sure it was my own. "Me and you."

The front door opened slowly, I heard the click of the bolt being shot and the creak of the handle being turned and the hinges groaning. I stiffened, glancing down at my watch. It couldn't be Niko, it was only eleven thirty. The sound of heavy footsteps made their way to the bathroom. My door was shut, but as the disturbed air filtered under the crack and met my nose, I relaxed instantly. It was Niko. Which might not be such a good thing.

The tap went on in the bathroom. Surely Niko hadn't run all the way home just to go to the bathroom and wash his hands. Surely they had sinks at the dojo.

"Nik? Why you back so soon?" I pushed open my door and caught sight of him in the bathroom. He was stripping off a bloodstained shirt and bending over the undersized sink, splashing water on a massive bite where his neck joined his shoulder. It looked ugly, bright red blood bubbling up from the crater in his flesh.

"Sh . . ." I breathed, but even my all-purpose swearword failed me. I bumped against the doorframe and leaned there for a second, staring.

Niko rolled his eyes up to look at me, then looked back down and concentrated on the task of washing out the bite, jaw tightly clenched to keep the hisses of pain inside.

"What _did _that to you?" I demanded, entering the bathroom and jerking his hand down to get a closer look at the wound. Whatever it was had torn a chunk right out of his neck, luckily missing the jugular but coming too damn close for my comfort. It wasn't too deep, but that didn't stop me from wanting to grab my knife and go chase whatever had done it. "Was it . . ."

"Yes," Nik finished. "Get me a wad of gauze from that drawer down there, and the surgical tape."

I dropped to my knees and fished for the requested items. "Let me do it," I told him, placing them on the counter. He'd have a hell of a time trying to do it himself, one-handed. He held still while I patted the area dry of water and blood and taped a large wad of gauze against it. "Shit, what is it about us Leandros brothers that makes us so appetizing?" First me with Sawney, now Niko and whatever this had been. Auphe – that's what it had been, he had said it.

"How on earth did they get you to hold still long enough to take a chomp like that?" I demanded, wadding up the bloodied shirt and tossing it in the sink before shutting the bathroom light. Niko walked out into the hallway.

"I didn't . . . see it coming."

That might have been more surprising than the fact that the Auphe had actually laid a hand on my ninja brother. He had kicked my ass on more than one occasion for failing to detect an enemy sneaking up behind. And now he had gone and done the same freaking thing? "You didn't . . . you didn't see it . . ."

"I didn't see it coming, okay, Cal? Happy?" he snapped. Then he brought his hand up to his face and sighed. "Sorry. That was uncalled for."

"Hey. People with pieces missing from their bodies are allowed to be grouchy," I said lightly, taking his elbow and steering him into the living area. "Now, sit down, and talk to me." I sat across from him, arms folded. "What happened."

"It jumped me in the shower room. It couldn't have gated, I would have sensed that. It had been crouched up on the lockers, apparently, just waiting. I'd been relaxing after a spar, and it jumped on my back, took a bite out of me, and gated the moment I pulled my sword." Niko winced and rotated his arm. "This thing is going to get infected. Who knows what that thing had in its mouth before me."

"Could it have been the same Auphe that talked with Robin?" I asked.

"I wish it would be," Niko sighed, dropping his head back to rest on the top of the backrest. He stared at the ceiling. "That would mean that they're not all over the place again."

I struggled to keep my shudder suppressed. The Auphe all over again. Not good. Most certainly shitty. And I remembered their promise – taking everyone before me. And they were gunning for Niko. Of course they were gunning for Niko, the bastards. They were smart, smart enough to know the basic rules of combat. You want to kill someone, you aim for the heart. You want to kill me, you aim for Niko.

"But you're alright?" I asked, just to be sure.

"Yeah," he said stoically. First a car crash and now this, in the space of twenty four hours. I wondered what it would take to un-stoic Niko. "It isn't as bad as yours was."

"Okay," I muttered. "If you say so." Delilah had a thing for me, but I doubted she would extend her affection so far as to nurse my human-sheep brother back to health for me. So it was good it wasn't as bad as it had looked. "You want something?"

He rolled his head sideways to look at me. "Not now, nurse, but later I may use the intercom to ask for a cup of Jell-O."

I should have taken the opportunity to kick him, now since he was incapacitated and all and couldn't fight back – as well. I didn't. Instead I nodded and squeezed his knee.

"Don't worry, Cal," Niko said, no doubt seeing the fear darkening my eyes. Shit, there was that damned responsibility again. Here he was with a bite out of him and he was the one telling me not to worry. "We'll fight them. You and me."

I jerked as though threatened with a strike. "Don't _say _that," I muttered.

"Don't say what?"

I didn't answer, my nightmare coming back. Niko using words from an Auphe's mouth. Not good. Not freaking pleasant.

"What is it?"

"Nothing. Forget it." I banished my personal nightmare and pulled back to look at reality. The Auphe were going after Niko. That was nightmare enough in itself.


	8. Sleeping With The Dead

_A/N: Sorry I didn't update in a day or two – AP exams take up all one's brain power. Hopefully I will be updating more frequently now that most of them are over. And . . . meep! I just got Roadkill from the library, but unfortunately my sister's got first dibs and I have to wait till she's done with it before I can read it. Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait! :D Also, I am aware that – according to the Leandros canon – there wouldn't be time in between Madhouse and Deathwish for this to happen, but heck, it's AU. _

_You know you are gone on a book character when you scratch his name into the sidewalk with your pocketknife while waiting to be picked up from an AP exam. Unfortunately, I started too late and only got through "Niko Le . . ." before my mom drove up. _

**EIGHT**

**Sleeping With The Dead **

After doing my damnedest to sew Niko's shoulder back to his neck – something I am really bad at – Niko walked around the house, stir-crazy and driving me up the wall. I never realized how much I valued those times home alone until Niko was _not _at the dojo and was instead occupying himself with making my life miserable. Housework was a bitch. Of course, he didn't _tell _me to do stuff, he _asked _me to, but to Niko it's one and the same.

"I thought you were into quiet suffering," I griped, slapping a can of Comet onto the kitchen counter. A puff of blue smoke rose into the air. I flopped onto the couch beside him, the exertion from cleaning the toilet wiping me out. He was watching the Discovery channel on television. "You trying to finish what the Auphe started?" I demanded, reaching for the remote. "Bore yourself to death?"

He snatched the remote away from me. "Do not attempt to rouse the sleeping lion, little brother, or it will bite your ass." And with that pious proverb and a thwack on the head, he promptly ignored me.

I studied the way he held himself, his arm propped up on the arm of the couch and his back straighter and more ramrod than usual. The brackets around his thinned-out lips spoke of the painkillers he had refused. I really wasn't used to seeing him in pain. It sucked.

"What do you think the Auphe want?" he asked finally.

"Us," I muttered. "Or more specifically, your dead mutilated body and my mindless screaming ass dragged back to Tumulus."

"No, I don't think that's it," Niko mused, muting the television. "If that's what they wanted, they could have finished me today. They could have attacked us on the way back from the dojo."

"They're predators. Catch the mouse and let it go."

"But wouldn't they leave a calling card? Something – besides this," he motioned to his shoulder, "that would frighten us? Cal, it's almost as though they don't _want _to frighten us. Or you. If they are here, now, watching and aware of us, wouldn't they be taking every opportunity to terrorize us?"

"Much as I hate to admit it," I grunted, sinking lower in the couch and sitting on my spine, "I think you have a point. Damn it. New rules. I _hate _new rules – I was just getting used to the old ones."

"I have a feeling we'll learn the game soon enough," Niko said, not particularly comfortingly. As far as I was concerned, this new game and its rules could go to hell.

I couldn't sleep that night. I was scared as shit to let my defenses down. There was no relaxing, no sweet blissful surrender to the goddess Sleep (upon whose altar I laid frequent sacrifices), when I was waiting for an Auphe to gate in here and finish what it had started. Or start something else. Who knew what they wanted anymore?

The sheets twisted around my legs as I flopped onto my stomach and pillowed my chin on my folded arms. _How is Cal? _What kind of a question is that? Of course, I hadn't witnessed it, but I could just picture it in my mind – an albino monster with metal teeth and glowing red eyes squatting on Robin's floor, shitting his carpet like the animal it is, and asking how I was. Like a damn mutual acquaintance, like a family member dropping by to say "Hey". In a way, such a casual reference like that brought the fact home that I was one of them more than any amount of snarling "Mine"s at the windowpane. Shit, how _was _I? Fine and dandy, thanks for asking, and how's uncle Balrog? Has he cut back on the live appetizers? His cholesterol was bound to give him trouble one of these days.

Just one of the family.

I shuddered and held up a hand in front of my face. White, pasty-pale, narrow – only half a genetic code away from being a skeletal claw with blood crusted under long nails. I closed my hand into a fist and tucked it under my stomach, which had begun to boil with nerves. That _couldn't _be me, I wouldn't _let _it.

After a few more minutes of restless tossing and turning, I finally slid from the sheath of blankets and stood up. Dragging my blanket off my bed and wrapping it around my shoulders, I drew my knife out from under my pillow and left my room. Padding across the short distance between my room and my brother's, I slowly pushed open the door and peered inside.

All safe, all quiet. The window was shut. Good window. Niko was lying rather stiffly on his back, apparently asleep. His shoulder was probably giving him hell – he had refused to take the pain medication. Then he had been a damned big brother and gone and noticed the odd smell in his grass tea when I had tried to melt a couple painkillers in the steaming liquid. I'd nearly gotten that cupful down my pants for my trouble.

Slipping through the door, I closed it gently behind me. The moment I crossed into his room, I knew Niko would wake up. He did not disappoint, his grey eyes suddenly glistening in the darkness. He didn't look away from the ceiling as he asked, "What's wrong?"

"The whole damn world," I replied matter-of-factly, and sat down next to the bed, leaning back against it and drawing up my legs. The knife dangled from one hand, ready for use should it be needed. I felt Niko's gaze on the back of my head, and I struggled not to shift uncomfortably under it. Yeah, so, bite me, it was pathetic, the whole guard dog business. But hell, it was only sensible, right? I mean, you know where they are going to strike, you protect it. You wear bullet proof vests to protect you from bullets. You sit sentinel at your brother's bed to protect yourself from . . . other things. Insanity, for one. Because that's what was in store for me if they ever got through my defense.

Niko let it go, not bothering to say anything. I was glad. Now that I was here, my mind was at rest and I realized I was tired as shit. Grimacing at the crick I expected in my neck tomorrow, I leaned back and rested my head on the edge of the mattress and closed my eyes. I was out instantly.

The next morning, I woke up with said expected crick in the neck, as well as a sense that something was wrong. Jerking up, I found that I had slumped over and was lying on the floor. A pillow had been stuffed under my face. Sitting up, cursing the hardness of floors, I scrubbed my hands through my hair and looked around, yawning like a cavern. Niko was out of bed. I could hear him in the kitchen.

My sixth sense – my Auphe sense – went crazy as I dragged my ass into the kitchen and fell into a chair. Niko deposited a cup of coffee in front of me.

"What's wrong?"

"Shit, you notice every frigging time," I grunted, rubbing my eyes with my fingers. "Something's not right. Don't know what – something . . ." A gate. Yeah, I realized, jerking up. The leftover feel of one, stagnating in the air like the stale smell of last night's fish. Shit. Shit, shit, when had they come? And why on earth were we still walking around with all our limbs attached?

I jumped from my seat and stood like I was ready to spar in the middle of the kitchen. It was ridiculous to get all defensive now, they were gone, whatever they'd wanted here. Or they were hiding here somewhere.

"Cal?"

"A gate. Oh, damn, Niko. They opened another damn gate in the frigging house last night."

"You think they're still in the apartment?" Niko snatched one of his many blades from the counter.

"Don't know." I glanced around for a weapon of my own, realizing I had left my own blade in Nik's bedroom. Niko slapped a second knife into my hand and I closed my fingers tightly around the rubber grip. This could be it.

Niko veered off toward the living area to do a check, and I headed toward the bathroom and bedrooms. My logical half was screaming the idiocy of this suspicion to me. I mean, if the Auphe were hiding in the apartment, why in hell hadn't they gotten around to their usual dismemberment and incapacitation routine? Why wait? But this was no time for logic. How logical was the fact that we believed demonic elves with evil intent were on our asses?

The half of me that had spent life on the run told me that it was always better to be safe than sorry.

The bathroom was clear, although it took me longer than I would have liked to admit to summon up the courage to throw back the shower curtain. I could just imagine it, the Auphe squatting naked and wriggling in the tub, grinning up at me from under long white locks like malignant bathing beauties gone all wrong. Except for the millipede curled in the corner and the hairball stuck in the shower drain, the tub was clear. As was the toilet, the sink, the medicine cabinet . . . and then I smelled it.

Violent death isn't a smell you forget easily. Once you've smelled the raw flesh exposed to the air and festering puddles of old blood, you recognize it right away. Hell, I've smelled it so many times I need to cover my nose every time I walk by the butcher's section of the local supermarket – it brings back too many bad memories. A dark bar and a slut of a girl who had been a bitch but hadn't deserved to die, Cerberus' employees torn to pieces for misdemeanors, a megalomaniacal puck standing in a puddle of my brother's blood, the bodies swinging on the meat hooks in Sawney's lair – yes, there were just too damn many unpleasant memories related to that particular smell. And now it was in the apartment.

Following my nose and trying to shove down the fear of finding Promise or Robin or Georgie mutilated as a fulfillment of their sick oath, I left the bathroom and walked into my bedroom . . .

It was lying in my damn bed. In my damn frigging bed. In the dimness, a mess of blood and golden curls, staining my sheets and staring glazed-eyed at the ceiling. "Shit!" I hollered, backing out of the room and banging into the lintel, whirling around to face the hallway, swallowing bile and trying not to dart to the bathroom to heave.

Niko passed me in a whoosh of displaced air that stank of butchered human, and I felt my knees turn to jelly. I didn't know any blond girls. Well, besides Delilah, but she was pale moon white-blond, not honey-colored springtime blond. Like this girl. Like this corpse. In my frigging bed.

Niko came back out of my room, one hand bloody with examination. He placed his clean hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "You know who she is?"

I shook my head, unable to trust myself if I opened my mouth.

"Neither do I. There were several mutilating bite marks, but only one fatal one to the neck. Judging from the spray of blood on the wall beside the bed, I would guess she was still alive when . . ."

I wrenched away from him and darted into the bathroom to throw up. Niko stood in the doorway until I had calmed down enough to croak, "And I needed to know . . . all that . . . right now . . . , why?"

Niko shook his head. "Sorry, Cal. Stay in here. I'll clean this up." He shut the door, and I obeyed, sitting on the edge of the tub, mopping strings of vomit from my chin, looking over my shoulder into the tub to make sure nothing was gating in behind me. This was one case of deferring responsibility to the older sibling that I didn't mind submitting to. Let Niko deal with it – I'd be more hindrance than help at this point.

One thing was certain, however. We couldn't stay here. I _refused _to stay here. I wondered what Niko would say to the proposal of moving in with Promise for a few days? If he didn't like the idea, then I'd settle for the YMCA, an exercise mat at the dojo, a back alley, a bench in Central Park and a newspaper. Anything but here. I couldn't sleep in that room again for a long time.

_What the hell do they want? _I couldn't stop my brain from replaying that particular question over and over again. I counted off the gruesome things that had shown up in my vicinity within the past few days – the blood-sucking flower, the scaled bird, and now a dead girl. That, plus the particularly violent dreams I'd been having lately, the pickle-infested pile of Auphe shit on Robin's apartment, the attempt on Niko's life, and the revenant and the car accident . . . It just didn't add up. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. _What in hell? What in bloody, bloody hell do they want? _


	9. N'zen

_A/N: And now the real action begins. _

**NINE**

**N'zen **

We stayed at Promise's. Niko bitched about it, against putting her in danger. But Promise – useful, for once – backed me up in insisting that we stay there. It wasn't much of a plan, this change of sleeping quarters, and I freely admit it. Hardly likely to fool the Auphe for more than a day – if that. Hell, they could have been following our car to her apartment the whole way.

Yes, the car. Having friends in high places – high in this case meaning loaded with cash – actually came in handy sometimes. Robin kindly did us the favor of locating and returning our car. The chassis was banged up, but it hadn't been any kind of beauty to begin with, and at least it was drivable. For that, I loved it. It meant my not having to run all the way to Promise's with Niko breathing down my neck, although I would have done even that to get away from the apartment and the stink of the dead girl.

I was thoroughly ashamed of myself for throwing up at the sight of the corpse. Shit, how many corpses did I need to see in my lifetime before I got over the gagging factor? But I suppose seeing some bleeding body in an alley or a sewer and seeing one in your own bed are two completely different things. Yeah? Exactly.

Promise looked perfect, as always, when she greeted us at the door of her apartment. She glanced concernedly at Niko's shoulder. "What happened?"

"Niko isn't popular with the other side of my family," I grimaced. That remark cost me a slap on the head.

"How many times to I have to tell you not to associate yourself with them?" Niko demanded.

I just stared at him with a raised eyebrow. "Niko, come on, who are you kidding?"

The brackets that formed around his thinned-out lips showed that my brother was no amused, but really, what in hell could I do? Pretend for his benefit that I had no idea who – what – I was? Shit, I _was _Auphe, and no amount of tongue-biting could change that, no matter how much we both wished it could.

Promise interrupted what could have developed into a Niko speech about how my good and human merits overcome my monster side and how genes do not make the man . . . good stuff, but not necessarily true, and definitely not something I hadn't heard before. Niko couldn't lecture the monster out of me, and that was that. He just refused to see it.

"Come with me," Promise took Niko by the arm and led him gently into the bedroom, where she would probably begin playing Florence Nightingale with fangs. Fun times for Niko.

"Have fun!" I waggled my fingers goodbye, and I could tell that if it hadn't been for the stitches and Promise's restraining touch, Niko would have beaten my ass into the floor for that particular remark. I smiled broadly – and falsely – at his scowl and padded into the kitchen.

"There's some Chinese in the refrigerator," Promise called to me, and I heard the door close. Chinese, huh? Promise must have stocked up when she heard we were coming. I couldn't seem to picture Promise with chopsticks and General Tso's dripping duck sauce.

Promise's fridge was practically bigger than our bathroom, and was gloriously well-stocked. Praising Heaven, I began digging for the beautiful promising white and red wire-handled cartons. I could hear muted conversation in the bedroom, and had to snicker. They couldn't possibly be doing anything too vigorous in there, not with Niko's shoulder in the state it was in – but surely Promise's little pain-management therapy should have merited silence on Niko's part. Talking between kisses – that was _so _Niko it wasn't even funny. Now, with Delilah and me . . .

I sat down at the table and dumped the contents of a carton of rice and pepper chicken on a delicate china plate. Sticking it in the microwave – or as Niko called it, the cancer-terrarium (hell, he couldn't expect me to eat my food cold, could he?) – I listened again for the sounds of conversation. They had lapsed into the sounds of passionate necking. _That's it, Niko_, I thought. The sound was disconcerting, actually. It brought back memories of Sophia's late-night business ventures, things that she felt no obligations to keep from her two listening and curious sons. And now, hearing those sounds again, with Niko . . .

I decided that I should get whatever stuff we had thrown into the car out of the car, and left the microwave beeping behind me.

Jogging down the staircase – no, I never used elevators, but you knew that – I came out into the parking garage. It was full of cars, jammed with muted and elegant colors and expensive makes, all glistening under the dim strip lighting. I hesitated for a minute.

"What a perfect place for an ambush," I muttered to myself, moving between the rows of silent, sleek, metal animals. I felt like they were watching me ominously. Perfect hiding places. In a dim garage, where no one could hear a cry for help . . . Niko would kill me for going down here alone. But now that I was here, damned if I was going to turn around and show them my ass.

"Robin would love it down here," I muttered to myself, not sure if I was talking to keep my own spirits up or to prove to whoever could be listening that I wasn't fazed.

It didn't take me long to locate our car. Shit, it stood out like a sore thumb. The expensive cars are low to the ground, narrow and flat and long. Ours looked like a sadly beat-up whale amid a pack of sharks. Ugly, ugly. Unlocking the side door, I slid it back and reached over the seat to grasp the plastic bags containing wadded clothes and a picnic basket heavy with weaponry. That was our life all over: knives in a picnic basket. Oxymoronic. Long word. Niko would be proud.

The gate opened before I could so much as turn around, and the Auphe hit me in the back, knocking me forward into the car and pinning me to the seat.

"Caliban," it called softly, nails puncturing my shoulders, it's weight unnaturally heavy, pinning me at the awkward angle. "Please don't struggle. Please don't fight."

_Since when the hell did the Auphe learn the word "please"? _I wrenched an arm out from under me and reached for the picnic basket. The Auphe on my back grabbed my wrist and yanked it back, the angle making my shoulder scream in protest. Which, actually, was the least of my worries.

Squirming out from under it, I flipped it off my back and threw it onto the seat, simultaneously yanking one of the knives from the picnic basket. The Auphe, much to my surprise, went limp beneath my stranglehold, and its red eyes went dark and blank as it stared up at me.

"Caliban," it whispered as I pressed the knife to its throat. "My brother."

"Shut up, damn you," I rasped, shuddering internally at the term of familiarity. I wanted to plunge my knife up its chin and puncture its shriveled black brain, kill it like I had every other Auphe I'd ever come into contact with. But I could imagine what Niko would do. He would interrogate it, find out what the hell they were planning with their devilish game of hide-and-go-seek. And he'd have my ass on a platter if he found out I let an opportunity like this slip.

It wasn't fighting me. Weird. Shit. I hated this new game. What happened to good old survival of the fittest? "What do you want?" I demanded, jamming my knife into its throat. Auphe were long lived, and a cut like that wouldn't kill this one, not by far. The black blood bubbled over my knife hand. "What's this damn game you're playing? What in shit do you want with us?"

The Auphe's hand darted up, too fast for even my honed reflexes, but instead of the rake of claws, it gripped my shoulder and squeezed it, hard but not bone-crushingly so. Almost like . . . I shuddered. It was a mockery of Niko's embrace. I shrugged it off, but it clung to me, and I put up with it because damn if I was going to release my hold to rip it off.

"Caliban, my brother," the Auphe whispered again, whistling through its metal teeth. "_Their _brother, yes, _family_. _Auphe. _But _my _brother more. More my brother than their brother – I am brother of Caliban. Caliban's father spawned me, spawned you. Me and you. Caliban and N'zen."

His words grated on my eardrums, shredding them. But the name . . . N'zen. It sounded . . . familiar. And the voice itself, shit, I'd never thought of the Auphe as separate entities. One big ugly horde – mind-linked, for all I knew – like an infestation of ants or termites. Blood-sucking termites. But this one, the voice was _familiar. _I'd _heard _it before. _Me and you. You and me. _

"N'zen," I whispered, tasting the word in my mouth. It tasted familiar. Damn it, had I ever actually called an Auphe by its name before? I hadn't even known they had names. I didn't like it – it made them too human, brought them up too close to human status for my liking. "Shit, I don't know who you are," I insisted.

"You do, brother," N'zen's hand was clammy on my shoulder, nails digging into my skin. "You _do_. You dream of me, I know. Chains and cold and darkness," it hissed. "N'zen helped Caliban."

My dream . . .

The Auphe that wanted me to come with it . . .

"No," I gasped, simply because I wouldn't believe it. I had gotten out of Tumulus by myself, I know I had. Then again, who was to say I had? I didn't remember anything. I dug my knife a little deeper and N'zen gave a whistling shriek and bucked. "You're lying. The Auphe want me dead. All the Auphe hate me."

"Yes," it bubbled. "All the Auphe. But we are brothers, Caliban. N'zen killed our sire for Caliban's escape."

Darkling had said once that I had killed my father. _I _had killed him. Great, just frigging great, now it was just a question of who to believe? A soul-stealing banshee or a blood-crazed demon. Shit.

"_You _killed him?" I demanded, my knife's pressure alleviating somewhat, subconsciously.

"N'zen killed," the Auphe affirmed, grinning with teeth blackened with its own blood. Then the pale face contorted into a rectus of anger and indignation. "But then Caliban left to go with _him_. Caliban left N'zen for the man with the sun hairs and the cold steel. The man that stays with Caliban always."

Nik.

"Don't talk about my brother," I growled, my knife tracing a bloody line down the scrawny, naked chest. The bravado was all a façade, however. I couldn't let this creature see how much the obvious hate it had for my brother threw me. "You attacked him yesterday, didn't you?"

"Yes," hissed N'zen. "N'zen _hates _him, N'zen wishes him _dead_. He took Caliban." The oddly black eyes lit up again with the usual hellish light. "N'zen is Caliban's brother the same as the man with the steel. The man with the steel and Caliban share the same dame. Caliban and N'zen share the same sire. The same _father_."

Okay, now that shook me up. Was it true? Was this creature, this _thing _– as much of a relation to me as Nik? My . . . God, I didn't even want to say the word. I hadn't even ever thought about my father siring other children, other Auphe, not just me. Who knew how many of my half-brothers and half-sisters I'd killed before . . . and now here was one of them staring me in the face, claiming my loyalty, saying it had helped me escape from Tumulus. And it was _jealous _of _Niko_?

I looked down at its sickly, skeletal little face and wondered if there was a family resemblance. The hand that was not gripping my shoulder in freakish parody of Niko was wrapped around my wrist. I glanced down at them – my hand and N'zen's – and, suddenly, saw similarities. The knobby joints and the long, slim fingers, the narrow palm and the long thumb . . . Both were covered in black blood.

"Oh, God," I choked, wrenching myself away from it and stepping back, feeling my stomach twist in disgust. N'zen leaped to his feet and climbed onto the car, squatting on top and looking down at me, the grin on his face mirroring the slit in his throat.

"Come back, Caliban, come back home," he crooned, waving a skeletal finger in a come-hither motion. A gray gate formed around it's hand.

"No." _Nik, where are you? Nik, come down here looking for me, please. _I needed Niko behind me, backing me up, a reminder of my humanity. His hand on my shoulder to erase the feel of that claw. . .

"N'zen can take you back and you can be _Auphe _again. Whole and right and who your blood makes you. Auphe."

"Go to hell, Auphe," I shouted desperately, my voice echoing in the large, dim garage.

"Yes," N'zen nodded eagerly, spattering blood all over the windows of the car. "Go back to hell, you and me."

I threw the knife at it. It whistled toward N'zen, end over end, but glanced off the top of the car with a twang and flew into the distance as the Auphe gated and landed behind me. I whirled, but not in time to stop it's attack. N'zen threw me to the floor, landed on top of me.

"You love the man with the knives, Caliban?" he grated in my ears as he laid his claw on the back of my neck, another Niko gesture freakishly warped. "You will follow the man with the knives. You will rescue the man with the knives from a place where the knives will do him no good."

The threats turned my stomach and I fought like hell, but its grip was like iron. I could feel the gate being opened. The tug in my gut made me want to heave again, although I doubted I had anything left in my stomach. N'zen was gabbling insanely as he opened the gate behind us.

"N'zen brought Caliban presents," he hissed in a hurt, vengeful voice. "N'zen brought beautiful flower and beautiful bird and beautiful girl to sleep with. N'zen eats human food that almost killed him."

_Ah, _thought the small part of my brain that wasn't panicking. _The hamburger pickle. _

My foot went through the gate, suddenly exposed to a freezing wind that cut right through my sneaker as though I weren't wearing it. It burned. Hell, it burned.

"Cal!"

"Niko, damn it, what took you so long?" I choked, writhing around to look behind me for the source of the voice. Niko was running across the garage, katana in hand and hair mussed from his making-out session with Promise.

N'zen screeched in anger at the sight of Niko, leaping off me and for my brother. The gate vanished as I pulled my foot out, and I leapt to my feet. I was too late.

Niko, intent upon N'zen and me, did not notice the gate opening like a giant mouth behind him.

"_Nik, behind!_" I shouted, running forward.

N'zen glanced back at me, gave a hideous grin, and levered off the ground like a frog, slamming into Niko's chest and propelling them both into the gate. I reached my hand out and grasped at Niko's. Our fingers brushed lightly, but he was gone before I could get a grip on his hand – and the gate closed.


	10. The Other End of the Gate

_A/N: Sorry about the erratic updating habits I've been keeping, but I don't want to commit to a set schedule because I'm afraid that in order to meet the deadlines I'd be pumping out less than quality fan fiction (that is to assume that I am currently pumping out quality fan fiction). I'm shooting for every other day, but one day I might update three chapters and then I might go several days. Bear with me. Or bite me. Your choice. _

_Also, please excuse the version of Tumulus that does not gel with what Rob wrote in _Deathwish_. I am basing it off the vision that Cal as Darkling had when he opened the gate to the past in book one. Or, if you want, this can be a more irrigated region than the desert section made reference to. It is still freezing, and the sky is still red, after all. _

**TEN**

**The Other End Of The Gate **

Once when I was seven, I remember coming back to the trailer after running to the communal john, and panicking because Niko had disappeared. He had been there seconds before, making dinner in the sorry excuse for a kitchenette, when I had left. Then I had got back and the stove was off and the light was off and he was gone. Just . . . gone.

I'd panicked, possibilities for his disappearance flashing through my juvenile and impressionable brain. I'd thought maybe Sophia had told him to go away and never come back. I'd thought maybe he had decided to leave because he was sick of me. I'd thought maybe my daddy and his friends had come to take him away. I think I might have cried. Shit. Okay, yeah, I'd cried like a teething two-year-old.

I felt that way now, on my hands and knees on the skid-marked, filthy concrete floor of the dim parking garage, staring at the place the gate had been only seconds before. The same shaking, helpless, shit-your-pants, panicking fear. Only this time Niko wasn't going to come back holding the eggs he had run out to borrow from a neighbor, he wasn't going to hug me and tell me that it was alright and listen in solemn horror as I told him what I had thought had happened. He'd told me he'd never leave me, and he'd never let anyone take him from me.

Well, it had been a lie, apparently.

It felt like he was dead. He'd come damn close to it before – at the hands of Hob during the kidnapping fiasco – but even then I could sense him, in this world, the light at the end of the dark tunnel, a solid presence that wasn't going to go away. Hell, if he was in some far flung jungle island in the South Seas I'd _feel _him. I couldn't feel him now, which scared the shit out of me. I closed my eyes and reached out and buried my nails in the palms of my hands, but I couldn't sense his presence. He was gone, just . . . gone. That Auphe bastard had taken him, partly for revenge and partly to get me to follow. What had he said? That I'd follow wherever he took Nik? Well, for once I was going to play the sucker for the bad guy and do exactly what it was he wanted. Because, hell, I was following. No matter what lay on the other end of the gate.

"Caliban," Promise called, stepping out from the stairwell. "Caliban, what happened? Where's Niko?"

I didn't answer. There wasn't time to answer.

I had never created a gate to Tumulus before. Well, that's not exactly true. I had once, but that had been Darkling working with my Auphe half, and I myself had had little to say or do about it. It was going to be rough – travelling from the Brooklyn bridge to my living room was one thing. Travelling to another place and time was a whole other kind of shit. But I'd be damned if I wasn't going to try.

I let my Auphe half wander down the neural pathways or wherever that innate knowledge of the inhuman and preternatural was stored. My inner monster, freed to wander where it would, knew exactly where to go. I had a sudden whiff of thin, sulfuric air, the tang of violently green foliage, and heard the bellows of long-dead beasts lost in the mists of time. _Home_.

Usually I would have shunned the thought, shoved it back to wherever it came from, locked it in there, and thrown away the key. But now I embraced it, terrible as it was, because it would lead me to Niko. And – in a way – that did mean "home".

"Caliban, what are you doing? Answer me!" Promise insisted, coming slowly through the parking garage. "Niko said something was wrong . . ."

"Get away," I shouted, dragging the gate out from inside of me. It opened in front of me, where the other gate had been, in a roar of temporal winds. Through its agonizingly slowly opening maw, I could see a flash of that same violent green, a red sky trapped forever in sunset, felt the cold. How anything green could grow in that cold I had no idea. But this was Tumulus we were talking about, not a place actually governed by the laws of biology or physics or whatever determined when and how plants grew.

I glanced at Promise, who had recoiled from me and my gate, her violet eyes large with incomprehension. "Cal, where are you_ going_?" she shouted, shaking off her fear and running toward me, one lily-white hand outstretched to grab me back.

No time for hesitation. If I didn't go through now and pull it closed after me, Promise would be joining me in hell. And I didn't have to worry about someone else right now. Hell, I didn't even have enough worry left in me to care about my own ass. This was all about Niko. Three was a crowd, and in Tumulus crowds got eaten quicker than twosomes.

I dove headfirst into the breach in time and space, like it was the deep end of a damn swimming pool. Right before the sensation of falling up, down, and sideways all at once rattled my brain into semiconscious panic, I sealed the gate behind me. I had a sudden vision of Promise alone in the dimly lit parking garage, her hand still reaching, frozen in shock. But it was too late for her to do anything. The Leandros brothers had left the building.

I fell for a long time. It wasn't like traveling from one place to another as I had done before, one second one place and the next, somewhere twenty miles down the road. I was literally falling, end over end, legs kicking, eyes tearing up, suffocated by the icy wind that seemed to suck all the oxygen from my lungs and replace it with a vacuum.

As I fell, I _remembered. _

My neck and my arm were burning and bloody again where dear old dad had grabbed me to pull me through the window of the trailer. I heard the words of glass and metal again, hot in my ear: "Mine. My spawn, mine." The burning trailer, Sophia blazing like a roman candle in the doorway, the realization that Niko was doing the same within.

And then my first vision of Tumulus, the Auphe surrounding me, herding me toward the caverns where I would spend the next two years, sandwiched between rock, fed my own vomit, bled to keep me weak, spending days after an escape attempt hanging upside-down over an abyss, sealed in a spiders' cocoon. Promised freedom and comfort if only I told them I would do it – only if I told them I would help them destroy the world. But, even at fourteen, I had known what that would mean. If they destroyed the human race and took over the world for their own, then what freedom and comfort could I expect? Besides, I hadn't spent the first fourteen years of my life with Niko's pride and honor drilled into my head without some of it rubbing off. In reality, it was his stubborn goodness in the face of Gypsy guile that had saved the universe. Which was one of the reasons I needed to get him back. He'd saved the universe too many damn times to get this kind of shitty payback.

My trip down memory lane came to an abrupt halt when I smashed face-first into the barbed grass. It wasn't nearly as hard as it should have been, considering the time it had taken me to drop from the high heavens. But it was hard enough to black me out for a second as I attempted to get the breath back into my lungs. I could feel liquid warmth on my face and a heavy, sluggish pounding in my head. _Great. I probably broke something_, I thought grimly, setting my teeth against the pain and lifting a hand to wipe the blood from my upper lip.

Gasping, I lifted my head, feeling the skin of my cheek catching on a hundred tiny devilish barbs, and looked up. I nearly lost what little breath I had managed to choke back into my system at the sight of the surrounding landscape. It put Steven Spielberg to shame, that was for sure, or any other movie director that ever tried his hand at the lush, warped prehistoric look. Jurassic Park had nothing on this. The ground sloped downwards, the color so violent green that it hurt to look at; it exuded a hazy green aura like motes of an airborne fungus. The sky followed the slope, the same ugly, glowing red color as Auphe eyes. The sight of it, scudded with black streamers of cloud that looked like smoke from a million funeral pyres, made me want to cower, cover my head with my hands, and bury my face in the serrated grass. It was too _familiar_. I though I would never have to deal with this sight again. That I could bury it in the dark corner of my head and forget about it and never be faced with it again.

No such luck.

Cowering was out of the question, as well, because I was on a mission. Getting shakily to my feet, I turned around in all directions, hoping against hope that I had opened a gate right behind Niko and that hellspawn, N'zen. Once again, no such damn frigging luck. I could have opened up a gate on the other side of Tumulus, for all I knew, or maybe . . . I shuddered as the terrible thought passed through my bemused brain . . . maybe it had already been years for Niko. I was by no means proficient at traveling yet, especially to parallel universes. I could have traveled too far into the future. Or maybe the past. Maybe Niko hadn't even been taken yet . . .

Shit, it was too much to think about. I couldn't wrap my head around it, I didn't want to. And in the end, it didn't really matter. I wasn't exactly planning on giving up and going home. No matter if I gated to the right time and place or not, I was scouring this godforsaken spit of hell until I found my brother or died. Maybe slaughtering N'zen in the most horrible way imaginable as well. Yeah, I'd throw that in the agenda for now, just to brighten my day.

Now that I was in an upright position, I could see something in the distance. A bank of hills, a mottled patchwork of blinding green and barren brown, tinted with hazy red. Trees, too, sprinkled before them. Well. My first stop.

I shivered as a bone-chilling wind rushed across the huge expanse of grassland and slammed into me. Now all I needed was a motorcycle. I'd even make do with the shitmobile. But I had not had the foresight to grab one of the cars and drive it through the gate I had opened – assuming that it would have stayed in one piece upon landing.

I wasn't gating, for two reasons. One, I was wiped from traveling to Tumulus. You didn't gate from one world to another like you jogged around the block. You didn't even do it like you ran flat out for ten miles. This exhaustion was more than physical, it was mental. Plus, I had a killer headache and my nose had finally stopped bleeding and I wasn't about to tempt fate. Two, the only reason I could gate was because I was half-Auphe. I had no idea if my traveling would send vibes jittering throughout the atmosphere, cluing all my little family members as to my arrival in their homeland. Our homeland. Because I was betting their reaction wasn't going to be throwing me a welcome home party.

So, for lack of a better method of transportation, I began to walk.


	11. Demons and Trolls

_I just finished _Roadkill_. I neeeeeeeed the next book! Seriously, I'm going to die without _Blackout_. Anyway, I just looked on Rob's website and there are going to be THREE MORE BOOKS! There has not been better news all week! How much more trouble can the Leandros boys get into, I wonder? I can't WAIT to find out! :D _

**ELEVEN**

**Demons and Trolls**

I shivered, wishing I hadn't left my coat sprawled over Promise's crème-colored couch. Also, the fact that I had kicked off my shoes upon entering the apartment was doing nothing good for my feet. My sweat socks were torn from the barbs on the grass, but the blood from my shredded soles made them stick to my feet, so that was okay. See? I could have a sense of optimism if I wanted. Why I chose that particular moment to develop it, I don't know. Maybe it was just my brain throwing up happy endorphins to block the reality from penetrating and driving me insane. Because, really, reality downright sucked. I was back in Tumulus, a place I had hoped and honestly believed I would never see again; I was going to catch hypothermia from the cold; my feet were torn and bleeding; I had no idea where I was headed or why I was headed there; and, that bastard N'zen had stolen my brother from me.

That kind of thinking was bound to explode any endorphins, and my optimism was reduced to a pile of lead at the bottom of my stomach that sat there and rankled. Niko was gone. Considering that I was still able to function and still had all my basic faculties – I mean, I wasn't in a coma and I was thinking as rationally as I ever had (not saying much, Nik would tell me) and I wasn't pissing myself spasmodically – I was actually doing an amazing job coping. But that was because I hadn't really given myself time to think about it, yet, not really. It had happened and I had acted. But I could feel the intense roil of emotions waiting, crouched, in my gut, waiting to spring into terrible action the moment I let myself think about it. And while walking through a never ending grassland in the middle of nowhere, what else could you do but think?

Niko was in Tumulus, the place that had driven me insane, in the clutches of the creatures that had tried to destroy the world. And one of these creatures apparently had a consuming hatred of Niko borne out of . . . jealousy. I hadn't even known the Auphe were capable of those kinds of emotions. For a moment, I couldn't help but wonder if Niko would have acted as drastically if he had been in N'zen's place: forgotten, rejected, forced to watch as I became more like N'zen and less like him. I should be feeling empathy for N'zen, at least a bit of it. You know, that tug of sympathy that urges people to buy sick relatives balloons or go to Hallmark and pick out a card with a sparkly teddy-bear on the cover. No such frigging luck, N'zen, sorry. You mess with Niko, you are less than shit to me. And damn it if I wasn't going to show that bloodsucking, pasty-assed bastard just what I did to people who messed with my brother.

And there. It was out. That emotional demon that had been waiting for the doorway to be opened. Someone had frigging _messed _with my _brother_. And this time it wasn't something that could be fixed by getting out the stitches or calling the ambulance.

Something so volatile I felt like if I lit a match it would explode boiled up inside of me and burst out in a scream of pure anger. Anger with what? Life. Fate. The Auphe. Myself, for being around to screw up Niko's life – once again – by having a relative homicidal – and suicidal – enough to lay a claw on him. Damn, I was even mad at Niko for being the stupid, idiotic and utterly loyal big brother he irrevocably was, forever running to my rescue.

I kicked at the grass violently, ripping the pads of my toes in the process. Finally fed up with my tattered socks, sticky with blood, I bent over and stripped them off, rolling them in a ball and tossing them as far as I could, and as hard as if it were a grenade at N'zen's head. "Damn it, Nik, why couldn't you have just _stayed the hell away _for _one damn time _in your _frigging life_?" I hollered at the red sky that looked like Auphe eyes. "I had it under control, you _bastard_!" Not true. I amended my statement. I could never lie to Niko, even when he wasn't around to pin me with his glacier glare. "Fine, then, I _didn't _have it under control! So what the hell? So I got kidnapped! Shit, Nik, so I _died_, that's no reason for you to be such a frigging brainless ass!" I had fallen to my knees somewhere between the last two sentences, and was pounding the ground with both clenched fists, mindless of the grass. "Why do you always have to be in _life-shitting-danger _because of _me? _You're so _frigging stupid _you don't know when to _walk away!_"

It was too cold, any warmth that I had had before sucked away by the terrifying and completely alien emotion of anger toward my brother. Had I ever actually been _angry _with him before? I'd hated him as Darkling, I'd wanted to kill him, but I hadn't been angry with him. I was now. I wanted to find him just so I could frigging kill him. And the moisture running in pathetic dribbles from the corners of my eyes was from the aridly frigid wind, nothing more. Stopping beating the ground uselessly, I proceeded to do something useful and curled in on myself, bending over my knees until my nose was centimeters from the serrated blades of grass.

I could hear exactly what he'd say if he found me like this. _Much as I appreciate this display of brotherly affection and concern which, by the way, would probably make you committable to many mental institutions, I think it would be more beneficial for you to actually get up and do something about the situation. _

"Shut up," I grunted to the grass. "You wouldn't act any differently if this had happened to me."

_I certainly would. I'd have found you, made you jump a gate back home, and nuked Tumulus by this time. _

Nuking Tumulus. Some thought. That'd be the thing to do with it alright. "Sure. The anal-retentive wreaks ninja hell in thirty minutes. Give me a break, Nik, I'm not you."

I realized I was talking to him – out loud. Not a good sign. Maybe I wasn't functioning as well as I thought I had been. This could be the first step towards insanity, and, considering the present course of events, insanity was probably only a few steps away, the logical next step on the list. But as long as my imaginary Nik was talking to me, I might as well take advantage of it.

"Nik, where are you? How do I find you?"

Bastard, he was quiet as the . . . he was really quiet. Damn it.

"Fine, be that way," I muttered, dragging breath through a congested nose and standing up. My hands were now bloody as well as my feet. "You never did go easy on me. Never even let me do odds or evens on my math practice sheets." Talking to him, even if he wasn't there, was comforting. And seriously wrong, mentally. But hell, I could take it, if it meant shoving down the grief and anger and allowing myself to function again.

So I did it. As I stared out over the grassland to the clump of hills and trees that had gotten significantly closer over the course of half an hour's walking, I did my damndest to push the demon of hatred back into the dark cupboard in my chest and lock him away. I'd let him grow and I'd take him out and sic him on N'zen when the time was right. I'd use it to get us both out of here alive. Or I'd use it to commit suicide if I was too late.

Too late. I talked to him again, willing him to hear me, wherever in this crazy, warped, and twisted world he was. "I'm _not _going to be too late. Don't give up yet." It was time for me to take responsibility for Nik, what I'd wished for back at the apartment before this had spiraled completely out of control. I was not going to screw this up. And nothing would stop me.

And that's when I saw them. They were running against the wind, which was why I hadn't smelled them before. Five of them from what I could see, but I didn't exactly stand there counting them off on my fingers. Trolls. This being Tumulus and of course worse than Earth in all possible ways, these guys were double the size of any monster I'd seen before. They were bigger than Boggle – and that was saying a lot. Shitting elephantine. They came thundering up the roll of empty plain as though they had materialized from thin air, all of them pummeling the ground with flailing limbs, eyes glinting so brightly in the nonexistent sunlight that I could see the gleam from here.

And I'd thought Abby was bad.

"Shit," I remarked passively, then decided my best option was to run. Very fast. What the hell happened to never leave your gun behind? Why hadn't I had the foresight to bring it? Niko would have kicked my ass right back to our own world if he'd known how stupid I'd been. _Shitshitshitshitshit. _

Suddenly, the barbed grass was the least of my worries, and I tore across that plain with a speed I didn't imagine I'd possessed, probably leaving a nice trail of warm, tasty blood for the pack of trolls to follow. Damn it. Was the whole world against me? As the ground rumbled underneath me with the force of oncoming troll feet and shook me to my knees, I decided _Yes, it was_, and hopped back to my feet.

I'd been so stupid as to imagine that the Auphe were going to be my only problem. And while they are problem enough in and of themselves, that did not mean that these trolls wanted to play fetch. Wait. Let me rephrase that. They probably _did _want to play fetch. Only with nothing as mundane or innocent as a big stick or a Frisbee.

The wind was twice as strong now, threatening to topple me over as I streaked across the sloping ground toward the clump of hills. I had no frigging clue how I was moving as fast as I was, only that it was faster than human limbs should have been able to operate. I was practically weightless, skimming along, surging ahead of the trolls.

They were no longer running against the wind and I could smell them now. A stink I didn't think could have been concealed from my ubersensitive nose. Ripe maggots in a festering corpse, beads of moisture on a sticky slab of flesh in the sweltering heat, crusty blood coating the backs of long thick tongues and fermenting in the damp humidity of animal mouths . . . Lots of imagery popped into my head at the first whiff of them, none of them exactly butterflies and roses. I gagged and ran faster, having no desire to become just one more aroma in the potpourri that was troll breath.

Abby, our little buddy back in New York, had talked about a time when he would fight with the Auphe for the fun of it, a time when they were strong. Funny I hadn't bothered assuming there'd be several in Tumulus. I had to wonder what else was here – what else lurked in this alternate dimension? Maybe even things that had yet to come to our world. Goody – nothing like variety, right? The spice of life, and all that kind of thing.

The trees that grew in thick, oasis-like patches in front of the hills were so close. So damn close. If I could make it there I could . . . what? Climb one? Rip one out of the ground and use it as a club? Play hide-and-seek behind the trunks? Maybe just die in the shade of them? My pace was lagging, the stitch from hell developing in my side and twingeing with every movement of my muscle. Not like that was going to stop me from running. "Can we have a time out, fellas? I've got a cramp, see, and I can't run from you very well like this. Five minutes, huh?" Yeah. Right.

I tripped. Niko forgive me – despite all that sparring and running my brother had drilled into my supposedly now aerobic ass, I tripped on my own feet. That is the not-so-great part about running who knows how many miles per hour. The falls are harder and more serious. I flew several feet, slammed my head against the ground, and felt my ankle twist underneath me.

_The trolls, you idiot, get to your feet! _I commanded myself, but my hands, braced for a push-up, slid out from under me and I lay spread-eagled on the ground, suddenly too drained to run another step. The world blacked out and in again. The trembling of the earth vibrated in my chest, as I blearily relished my last few heartbeats, the last few moments of painless existence before torture and death. And then the humans came pouring out of the trees I had been making for.

Like ants stirred out of their nest, they came running, a dozen of them, howling like wild things and brandishing weapons fashioned out of wood. Except for the lead guy, who brandished a gleaming metal sword.

The trolls' roars erupted behind me, and I blacked out a second time, fully expecting never to wake up. _I tried, Nik. I'm sorry. _


	12. Upwind

_A/N: I'd just like to thank kooie and airyie for their constant reviewing of my work. Reviews are what encourage me to write the next chapter. So, thank you Also, in reply to kooie's review, if it's next to Nightlife (definitely the best in my book), _Blackout _must be amazing indeed! I can't wait! :D _

**TWELVE**

**Upwind**

"Okay, Nik, cut it out. Nik, I said quit it, damn it! This is so not right, I'm going to kick your ass from here right back to Washington Square Park!"

"Shut up," came the firm reply. I could hear the humor in my brother's voice, though, and I couldn't help but wonder how long he had wanted to do this. "This is what you get for flagrantly disobeying me."

"For _how _disobeying you?"

"Flagrantly, you moron."

I was slung over Nik's shoulder like a sack of potatoes, his arm slung around my knees as he clasped them to his chest. My head and torso were dangling down his back, my eyes level with his ass. Thanks for the lovely view, Nik. Girls would have loved this angle, but I was his brother and it was more gross than tantalizing. I slapped the heels of my hands against the small of his back, feeling the blood rushing to my head as he jogged, jostling me up and down.

I had finally gotten fed up with our ten mile runs and – dead on my feet – I had sat down on the sidewalk and refused to budge. Niko had kicked me around, not a lot but it hurt, but I had decided I wasn't giving in to him this time. He could kick and threaten me all he wanted, but I was sick of running and sweating simply because he snapped his fingers and said "Go."

Which was when he somehow flipped me over and suddenly I was looking at the world – and Niko's ass – upside down. He carried me back to the apartment like that, despite my continuous protests and threats and the amused grimaces and laughter of passersby. Not the way for a half-Auphe, gun-toting hoodlum like myself should be seen. I could only pray none of the customers from the bar I was currently working at saw me. I had a rep to keep up there, and if they saw me like this – yeah, you get the picture. It wouldn't be pretty. Not that Niko had any consideration whatsoever that his little brother's badass image was being sullied . . . I beat at him again, with my fists this time, and resumed my swearing.

"Shut up," growled a voice. But not Nik's. Definitely not Nik's.

I opened my eyes to see myself facing another ass, this one covered in what looked like a very tattered pair of gray shorts. They didn't smell too good, either. And the ground rolling under the large bare feet was covered with red-tinted grass, not street-lit asphalt.

"Wha . . ." I gasped.

And then I remembered that the incident I had been reliving during my blackout was a memory. It had happened nearly four years ago, when we had first come to the Big Apple to get away from the Auphe. Grendels, we used to call them.

I was in Tumulus, the last thing I remember was trolls, and Nik was obviously not the one toting me around like a college-student's backpack.

So who the hell was?

"Who the hell are you?" I demanded, pushing against the broad, bare back and trying to get my head up to drain away some of the blood that was threatening to burst my brain. "Put me down!"

"You can't walk," grunted my bearer, whoever it was.

"What'd you call me?" I demanded, and then decided now was not the time to gripe about less-than-complementary nicknames. _Less-than-complementary_? Damn, I was starting to sound like Niko. Where oh where had my badass gone? "Listen, I could knock you unconscious with a single pinch, asshole."

I could, too. Niko had taught me exactly where the nerve clusters were located. If I could make my arm stretch backwards and up far enough, I knew there was one exactly in the center of the guy's head, right at the base of the skull. One good hard squeeze and he was out like a light.

The man slowed his pace, stopped, and the world flipped nauseatingly and I was on my feet.

I weaved for a second but managed to stand steady after a second. Glancing around, I saw about a dozen other people jogging or running back towards the trees. They all looked like shit. Present company not excluded. I glanced over at my personal hairy sedan. He was huge, muscular and probably somewhere around seven feet tall. His head looked more like a mound of hair, what with the huge orangey mop and beard covering most of his features. His eyes gleamed a very pale blue, and, despite the rest of his Neanderthal appearance and halted speech, they looked cultured and sharply sentient. He also was wearing what looked like the frugal remnants of a white collared shirt, complete with a ratty tie that looked as though it had been used to wipe someone's ass more than once. Which it probably had. I doubted the Auphe had a surplus store of toilet paper handy. The shorts were probably what was left of a pair of expensive charcoal-gray trousers. A knotted wooden club was stuck down one pant-leg, ready for grabbing and wielding.

"Shit, who are you?"

The man frowned, or I thought he did. Difficult to tell under all that hair. "I should be asking the questions." His breath blew around the wiry strands of drooping mustache that concealed his mouth. "You're new. And they didn't bring you. You are coming the wrong way to have escaped."

"I'm new," I asserted, getting that out of the way. "And by 'they' do you mean . . ."

"Keep running," the man grunted, darting ahead with a speed that almost equaled mine. I ran behind him, careful to keep my speed relatively average so as to keep myself from falling and knocking myself out again. I also concentrated on keeping away from the no doubt radioactively filthy tie that was flapping in the wind like a tongue. "The trolls are not far behind. If we are not upwind, they will smell us and run us into the ground."

I glanced back behind me. There were several black mounds lying in the grass not too far behind us, and if I hadn't known better, I could have been a tourist looking at a rock formation in Devil's frigging Den. Don't ask me how those guys took down five trolls on a hunt with nothing but wooden sticks. Don't ask me why there were humans in Tumulus in the first place.

"What's your name?" I demanded, flanking the hairy man mountain, still out of tie range.

"Larry."

_Larry? Okay. Fine. Larry. I'll play. _"Hey, nice to meet you, I'm Cal."

He didn't look at me as he gritted out, "Welcome to hell."

"Thanks," I said, deciding it would be better not to mention the fact that I'd been here before. I didn't know how that would be taken. Best not to trust a complete stranger with your life story. Especially if that life story involves you as being part Auphe and the stranger has a weapon handy. But that didn't mean I couldn't fill him in on my present situation. He might be a source of valuable information. "I'm looking for my broth . . ."

"No talking."

Okay, fine, shit it. I wasn't about to argue with a guy who looked like he could snap my neck lie brittle spaghetti. I'd wait until we were wherever it was they were taking me – hopefully out of troll range – and then sap the information out of him, maybe stealing his club and slamming it over his head to emphasize the more important questions. Such as – where the hell was my brother?

The moment I stepped into the trees, I was hit by several sensations all at once. There was the general relaxing of muscles you get when you dive under the covers of your bed or pull back the shower curtain and see the empty tub when you were expecting a monster curled in there. Really nice feeling. Another feeling, not so nice, was the awareness of the Auphe's presence. I had been semi-aware of it ever since arriving at Tumulus – it's only logical to be on the lookout for your enemies when you're on their home turf. But this was almost tangible – the vague fear of them hung in the air like dust motes, swirling in the red light like demon dancers. The group of humans I was with obviously sensed it too. While they apparently had no problem taking out several trolls, they did have a problem with the Auphe. They shifted and murmured among themselves, drawing the rags of their clothes closer around them like they were cloaks of frigging invisibility. I shivered along with them, knowing my monster blood probably made the awareness of them even stronger. Lucky shit, those guys. They didn't know what they had.

We converged on what appeared to be a tangle of overgrown underbrush and began shifting leaves and twigs and dragging whole bushes off of what was revealed to be a hole in the ground. They slid into the hole and disappeared in the darkness, each of them casting glances up at the sky as if they expected it to be the last time. I craned my neck to look up at the red glow canopying the prehistoric-looking trees. Not much of a sky.

"Inside the Home," Larry ordered, giving me a shove forward.

I didn't like being shoved, and I almost turned around and said something smart. Then I remembered his lethal weapon shoved down his pants and the even more lethal piece of material hanging around his damn bulbous neck. Maybe I had better stay on these guys' good side. After all, they could be the one real chance I had of finding Nik. You never knew. And as long as you never knew, you could keep on hoping.

And that was really the only thing keeping me from totally losing it right now.

I slid into the hole. Actually, it was a tunnel. It stretched in a tube angled steeply down, and I followed it carefully, hands braced against the wall on either side to keep myself from pitching forward and tumbling to wherever this thing ended. The earth smelled strange here. Burnt. The scent made it difficult to breathe.

I could sense Larry behind me, and that didn't smell too good either.

"Home sweet home," I muttered darkly, stepping into the ring of torchlight that kept the inky blackness of under-the-earth from completely claiming the rat hole these guys had dug for themselves. It was maybe the size of Niko's and my apartment – about twenty by twenty. The torches, made from simple sticks, were stuck in the ground at random places and burning dully. The guys who had saved my ass were already sitting in various positions, slouched in the corners, looking as though they had been there for centuries.

"It's all the home we have," Larry confided in me solemnly. Now that we weren't belting out four syllable sentences in the middle of running for our lives, I could tell that Larry had an accent. A slight one – I couldn't place it. Nik would have been able to . . . Don't go there. Just don't. Larry continued in his droning tirade. "All we can hope for. We cannot get back, so we have to adapt."

"Back where?"

"From Earth. The cursed hellspawn took us all, wishing to eat us. But we escaped their clutches and hid here, hoping one day to find a way back."

All this time, they had been waiting – and all I had to do was open a gate. In theory. I could feel the ability inside of me if I searched for it, but it was faint. I supposed that gating between worlds really took it out of you and it would be a while before I got enough strength back to make a jump like that again. Shit, I was lucky I wasn't snoring like a baby in the middle of the damn plain like I would have been several months ago.

"Huh," I said, for lack of something better to say. I wasn't about to play travel agent to these guys, no matter how sad their plight. If I tried to tear a hole in space and time again right now – and you could rest assured these people would want out _right now _as opposed to _tomorrow _– I might completely drain myself. And I needed all the energy I could get to gate me and Niko back to our world once I found him. Besides, in order to explain to these guys what I could do, I would have to explain the whole DNA thing. And judging from the way Larry spoke of the Auphe, I didn't think they'd be too understanding.

"Hellspawn! Oh, God, _Them_!"

A skinny guy who looked like a walking skeleton sprang up from his corner, thick club gripped in a scrawny fist. Don't ask me how he hefted that heavy thing with an arm like a stick. He pointed at me, eyes round and chalky in the half-light as egg yolks. "_Auphe_! Kill it! Kill it, before it eats us!"

Shit. That was convenient, wasn't it? They guy could smell me. Looked like I wasn't going to have to rip a hole in space to let slip the fact that I wasn't as human as the rest of these people. I opened my mouth, ready to launch into an explanation-slash-string of curses, but Larry held up his massive hairy paw.

"Calm down, Reginald. It's not Them." The man mountain looked at me. "Poor Reggie's gone half mad with the stress. Can't say I blame him."

Forgive me if I wasn't bawling over the guy's fate or defending his questionable sanity. I was going to grab this lifeline and run with it. "Poor guy," I nodded understandingly. When Reggie's club hit me in the side of my head, I quickly amended that statement. "Bastard!" I shouted, toppling sideways with a split temple. I reached up to touch the blood that trickled down the side of my face and into my eye.

"You took me away from my family," Reggie ranted, "I'll kill you! You tried to _eat _me! I'll kill you! I . . ." He was screeching but thankfully there was no more hitting. Not for the moment, anyway. Larry had the guy restrained, but poor Reggie wasn't losing his hold on that damn club and looked about ready to break loose and come at me swinging and shit.

"Reggie, you're imagining. The guy's not one of Them."

"It _is_," insisted Reggie.

In a way, I did feel sympathy for the guy. I mean, hell, he was living a nightmare with no end in sight, dragged kicking and screaming from his world, forced to live underground – it would do shit with your head, I guessed. That didn't keep me from getting pissed when he broke out of Larry's grip – damn, that little skinny guy must have been _strong_ – and came clubbing a second time.

I darted away from the guy easily, throwing myself to the side and levering to my feet. Emaciation and a heavy weapon can slow you down, so I wasn't surprised that he missed me. But poor cracked Reggie was smart enough to recognize that my movements were slightly faster and more lithe than they should have been.

"Did you see how fast it moved?" he sobbed as Larry grasped him once again. "Did you see? It skittered away, fast as Them!"

Larry did raise an eyebrow at me as he held onto Reggie. Damn it, I'd have to be careful. If Reggie weren't a known crazy he could make my case very difficult. How the hell did he pick up on it, anyway? By scent? No, these guys were human, not monster. Only the monsters smelled me for who I was. Instinct, maybe, though. Years – and with Reggie it looked like decades – on the run from creatures might give you some kind of internal alarm system to warn you when one got too close.

Fortunately, someone besides me was not in the mood for a sparring session. "Reginald, hold." The voice came out of the shadows beyond the uneven ring of torches. I squinted in its direction but couldn't make anything out. I instantly did a sniffing check, just to make sure whoever it was, was human. He was. He stank like a revenant, but he was a full-blooded human.

Reggie instantly stopped panicking, going limp in Larry's grasp and twitching, staring at me with bugged out eyes. Yeah, so what else was new? It was a more familiar expression to me than a welcoming smile. I didn't take it personally, although Niko would have. He would have had this guy's dick on a chopping block for screaming that I was Auphe and trying to take me out.

"Larry, get him settled," ordered the voice.

As Larry led a whimpering Reggie away, the guy who saved me from exposure for what I was stepped into the light. I can't tell you what I expected. Leader of the tribe by virtue of muscle and the biggest club, maybe. The guy was tiny, several inches shorter than me. He had a narrow face that looked like it belonged on a greyhound, and pale hair that hung down below his shoulders in limp strands. He was dressed in the remnants of khakis and a shirt that I thought said "Man Cave" at one time – huh. Well, your wish is my command and here's your cave, happy birthday, I thought, glancing from the disintegrated writing to the surroundings. How the hell the guy kept his status as obvious leader was a mystery to me. Until I saw that it probably _was _by virtue of the biggest club.

It was dangling from his hand, glinting softly in the orange light, the bars of fire shifting along its well-greased planes as though it were saying hello and how've you been? The matte black rubber grip, the notch in the blade a few inches from the curving tip . . . Shit, I'd know it anywhere.

Nik's katana.


	13. The Only Piece Left

_A/N: And we've gotten to chapter thirteen. Major stuff coming up here, I hope I stay in character throughout this rather crucial and emotional part of the story. It's kind of short, this chapter, but a lot happens here. _

**THIRTEEN**

**The Only Piece Left **

I like to think I'm a fair guy. Not nice perhaps, but fair. Benefit of the doubt and all that kind of shit. So I gave the guy exactly three seconds to explain why in hell he had my brother's weapon dangling from his scrawny fist before I jumped him.

Snatching one of the burning torches from the ground, I hefted it like the club I had just been brained with, and rushed the guy. The sword flashed up, slower than it would have in Niko's grip, but fast enough to put a sliver of doubt in my mind. This guy knew what he was doing. I stopped several inches from his face, the katana's edge practically grazing my nose, the torch I held whiting out part of my vision as I held it alongside his face. One false move and I'd set his hair on fire.

"What's the matter?" the guy drawled lazily, flicking the katana so it grazed the tip of my nose without drawing blood. He was stoic, damn him. That would make him harder to terrorize into giving me the sword back.

"You've got my brother's sword," I grated, waving the fire around, threateningly close to the pale strands. "Give it. Now."

"This is _my _weapon," the man told me.

"Yeah? Bullshit. It's my brother's, so hand it over or I'm going to take it away from you."

He smirked, a quirk of his lips. Damn, the expression made me so angry, I could barely see straight. Or maybe that was the glare from the torch. Flashing my fire, I reached out with my free hand and grasped him around the throat. "Don't make me make you wish the hellspawn still had you."

Something snapped in the guy's calm. The katana sliced through the air, and I was just quick enough to avoid it, jumping back as it skimmed my stomach. The guy grinned, and for a split second – in the semidarkness – he looked like Niko. Damn, I was really losing it. I'd been talking to him before, now I was projecting images of him onto others.

The katana came again a second time, and I had a brief second to reflect on the fact that I'd never actually thought of it as a deadly weapon. It had been a comfort, somehow, used always to protect me and never hurt me. That shining curve of razor-sharp metal was damn scary when it was coming straight at you. I brought the flaming torch up to block it's decent, saving my head from being cracked open like an egg.

The guy smirked. "You're good. Quick thinker. I like that."

"I'm a lot quicker than you."

"No one's quicker than I am."

"I can think of someone," I growled.

He whirled and brought the katana around again, this time aiming for a cut across my ribs. I pivoted and brought the torch down again. Then, sick of playing the defensive, I switched to offensive mode and jabbed the burning end in his direction. He flipped the katana in mid-swing to bring it up and lop off the top of my weapon. A chunk of burning wood spun into a corner.

"Hey!" I objected. "Come on. The least you could do was leave me my fire."

"Little boys shouldn't play with fire," the man told me coolly, and I knew that if I could see his face in full light it would have a sick superior smirk plastered all over it.

"And homicidal maniacs shouldn't play with knives," I added testily, bringing my now smoldering stick back around to block another swipe.

But the bastard was tricky as hell, and the whispering blade switched direction and thwacked me over my knees. Both damn knees. I felt the blade go through them. Not deeply enough to hamstring me, but it drew blood. The anger toward this guy I'd felt throughout the whole fight, boiling beneath my ribs, suddenly exploded. This was wrong on so many counts. Niko's own katana shouldn't have my blood staining it. I shouldn't be standing here letting this guy take me out while my brother was depending on me to rescue him. And rescuing your brother, it usually worked the best when you weren't wounded and bleeding.

In a blind fit of rage, I brought my makeshift club around and slammed it against side of the guy's head. Something cracked, and the guy toppled backwards, landing on his side, out for the count. The katana clattered to the ground, and I bent to pick it up.

There were murmurs around me as the man's followers realized that I'd beaten him. I glanced over at where Larry stood, obviously at a loss, hands wrapped in whatever was left of his shirt. What to do? It was obvious no one really felt any keen affiliation or friendship toward their leader, or I'd be being mauled just about now. They just stood there, staring at me with their egg-yolk eyes, as I gripped my brother's sword – still stained with my blood.

I took it over to another torch to look at it, make sure the guy hadn't been filing his toenails on it or something. That would have really pissed Niko off, and I almost laughed at what I imagined his expression would be if he witnessed something like that. The laugh died before it was even born as I realized something.

I'd assumed that Nik had lost the katana after he'd come to Tumulus – let it drop on the ground, either in the middle of a fight or as a sign for me. He'd know I'd come after him and would want me to find it and know he'd been there. The hit man's version of Hansel and Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs. I'd thought that the guy must have come across it before I could have, claimed it for his own, finder's keepers and shit.

But I looked at it now, and I realized something that set my heart rate up a couple of notches, and made me forget the pain in my sliced up knees. I'd seen Nik's katana earlier today, back when we were searching for the Auphe in the apartment (shit, was it only this morning?) It had been recently oiled and pristinely polished, the rubber grip worn but still in good condition.

This weapon was stained with what looked like years of old dried blood. The blade was filthy, filthier than Nik would ever allow it to be. It had long scratches along it's planes, and red rust was gathered around crossguard. The grip's rubber was torn and shredded, ripped away in places to reveal the steel hilt beneath. I double-checked the engraved logo on the pommel. Yes, same company, same name, same make, same sword. It _was _Nik's katana, but it was old. It was _old. _

I raised my fist to my mouth and closed my eyes, realizing what it meant. The only thing it _could _mean. Whoever this guy was, he had had the sword for – what? – years, it looked like, from the condition of the weapon. He'd found it . . . years ago. Which meant . . .

"Damn it!" I hollered, dropping the katana as though it had scalded me. I slapped my palms against my forehead and dragged my fingers through my hair, my breathing gone ragged. I had come out of my gate the wrong time. I was too late. By years, I was too late.

"_Damn!_"

N'zen had taken Niko years ago. He'd been here years.

"_DAMN IT_!" My voice echoed through the cave.

Which meant he'd be dead. They had no reason to keep him alive as they had me, because he was of no use to them. The Auphe had killed my brother. "Da . . ." My last curse disintegrated in my throat and came out in a whoosh of air as though someone had punched me in the stomach.

My knees collapsed underneath me, and I hit the ground hard, catching myself on the flats of my palms. The voices of the others began to pick up, murmuring nervously. I probably looked crazy. I didn't care what they thought. I hoped they killed me. I hoped they'd take my head off with one of their clubs.

When no one came over to land a fatal blow, I crawled forward on my hands and knees, feeling nothing but a cold, moaning wind whistling in the vacuum inside of me and the bite of the stone floor beneath me. My hand closed around the katana's ruined grip, and I dragged it with me until I was pressed up against the wall of the cave, out of range of the torches. Pressing my cheek against the frozen stony wall, I stared blankly at the thing in my hand, the only piece of Niko I had left.


	14. He Has To Die

**FOURTEEN**

**He Has To Die**

Time, it was a bitch, never moving the way you wanted it to. If it could get you, it would. If you weren't looking forward to something, time flew. If you were looking forward to something, it dragged its damn feet and walked around in circles. I remember once . . . The empty pang in my stomach exploded threateningly and I shoved any attempts at memories into the back of my head. It was like tearing at the edges of a gaping wound, making it wider.

Anyway, time.

It had screwed me big time. I kept replaying the car garage scene in my head, over and over. I could have just killed N'zen before he even started talking. I had the damn knife in my freaking hand. It was up against the asshole's throat. I could have just pressed a little harder, slit a little deeper, and I'd be back in Promise's apartment, listening to Niko and Promise make out and eating lukewarm Chinese.

Or I should have just dove in with them when N'zen had dragged Niko into the gate, come out with them. Even if I couldn't have rescued him, I could have at least died with him. I was too damn cocky, thinking I could just rip open a gate and travel to the time and place I wanted. No, worse than that. I hadn't even thought. Niko'd spent years drilling the "think-before-you-act" maxim into my hard skull, and the one time that I would have been able to use that maxim to save him, I'd flunked. I'd flunked worse than I had that year in geometry when . . .

Damn it, another memory. Or maybe this was simply my life flashing before my eyes. Good. That meant I'd be dead soon, right? Dead and gone? And then maybe . . . I'd never believed in an afterlife, believing that the here and now was all we had; live, love, and kick monster ass because once you bit the dust, it was all over. Now I didn't want it to be over. God, I didn't want it.

Struggling against a lifetime of conditioning my thoughts to that, I struggled to imagine what the afterlife might look like. Would it be dark or full of fire or bright and beautiful? I hoped for Niko's sake that there were plenty of virgins, dojos, and a place he could buy a new katana.

"You must have some arm," someone said, the voice too near me to be directed at anyone else. "He's still out cold." I jerked, startled, spinning around to face Larry. He was hunkered down several feet away, on the balls of his feet. It looked like the pose you would get into if you were trying to approach an animal you wanted to pet but didn't know if it would bite. Good Cal. That's a nice Cal.

I wondered how long I'd been sitting here, senseless. Seemed like hours, but it might have only been several minutes. Damn time again.

I snarled at him, knowing I would bite. "What do you want? Come to take my head off? Be my guest."

Larry's hairy face quirked. "Boy, you need to calm down. I know it's traumatic to come through one of those holes in the sky and all that, but insanity won't stick it. It might seem nice and peaceful right now, but you're going to need all your wits to survive this place." He shuddered, his huge shoulders rippling.

So everyone thought I was insane, then. I couldn't have cared less. Shit, I probably was. His words certainly seemed to apply to me. The longer I sat here, the closer I could feel that nice, peaceful existence getting. Relief, just to forget everything, to die in the dark, and to not have to wake up and realize that your only family is gone . . . Not my only family. N'zen was probably out there somewhere, and he was just as much my family as Niko had been, at least by blood. Blood I would spill.

And the calm was gone like that, replaced by a bright red fury that all but blinded me. I clenched my fist around the weapon I still clutched. Blood I would draw from him, slowly and painfully, drop by drop, blood I would drink in front of his agonized and paralyzed face. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a brother for a brother. I swore it on the katana.

But I couldn't let them see me like that, see me crazed and bloodthirsty. Where a second ago I'd wanted them to kill me, now I knew I needed to live. For one purpose. To find that bastard N'zen – even if I had to cut my way through the whole of the Auphe population to find him.

So I covered the madness with a sardonic grin. Yes, I could smile again. Because I was happy, happy at the thought of killing. "Seems Reggie's still hale and healthy," I remarked dryly in contest to his claim that only the sane would survive. What kind of bullshit was that? Only the sane survived? It was only the insane that could manage to live in a world as crazy and shitty as this.

"Reggie's still with us only because he's rational half the time and we need every man we can get. And he isn't violent." I snorted at that, my bloody temple a testimony to good old Reggie's pacifism. "We help him, because we stay together. But if you're going to be throwing fits, Nick will have no problem in kicking you out or putting you out of your misery with that sword you seem to find so interesting."

"Nick," I repeated blankly, stomach suddenly lurching.

"That's right. The Home leader, Nick. He's as good as they come. Years with the hellspawn broke him down a little, but he's still hard as nails. He'd never leave someone behind that depended on him, but he's merciless if the safety of the Home or those who live in it are in danger. If you'd be a danger to us, Nick would feel no qualms in tying you to a tree and dousing you in troll pheromones." Larry was babbling. The guy didn't make any sense. Nick? Troll pheromones? Years with the hellspawn . . . _Nick? _Or . . .

"Tell me about Nick," I said slowly, each word heavy on my tongue and difficult to spit into the air.

"There's not too much to tell," Larry said, glancing back at where the Home leader was still sprawled out in a flickering patch of torchlight. "When he came to us he didn't know who he was, where he was. Acted like an animal let out from a cage after a long time. Just kind of wandered around, snapping and growling if anyone came too close. We would have sent him one or killed him straight off, but he was too good a fighter to lose, especially when you live here. He'd go out for days at a time and we'd think we'd never see him again. Then he'd come back with some kind of unidentifiable monster's carcass and it'd feed us for a week."

"He had the sword from the beginning?" I demanded, showing Larry the weapon.

"From what I remember," Larry said, nodding. "Don't ask me how the guy managed to hang on to a weapon in Their pits." He shook his head and shuddered.

I looked over at Nick. He was just sprawled there, pale blond hair fanned out, his body shrunken and emaciated with torture and poor eating habits. But there was something in the posture, maybe, that was familiar . . . or maybe it was just damn wishful thinking. Or I could be damn crazy. "He still doesn't remember anything?"

"Well," Larry shifted and got more comfortable, assured from my half-sentient tones that I wasn't going to jump up and strangle him. "We managed to get some stuff out of him after a while. He said his name was Nick, that he was from the city."

Nick from the city. How many Nicks were in how many cities? Damn it, thousands, millions.

"He said he'd been waiting for someone," Larry grimaced and scratched his mop of hair, trying to remember. "But then he got all cold and mad and would talk about it anymore. That was right before one of his long excursions."

What remained of the katana's rubber hilt disintegrated in my death grip. He'd been waiting for me. And . . . and oh, God, I hadn't come. I had jumped after him a second later in my world, my timeline. But in Nik's timeline – if this Nick was Nik – I'd deserted him, abandoned him, left him to rot in the Auphe pits.

"How many years was he there? With the . . . with Them."

"Thirteen years."

I was on my feet, the katana abandoned, crossing the distance between me and the Home leader. This could all be coincidence, some shitty twist of fate or of my own mind – trying to make what was impossible possible to save my sanity. But I knew one way I could know for certain, one sure way.

Ignoring the wary looks of the others, I crouched over Nick and rolled him onto his back. He flopped limply, a large bloody bruise messing up his left temple where I'd hit him. I grimaced at the thought that this might be Nik and I might have just given him a concussion. But if this _was _Niko, he wouldn't have let me even get close to him. He'd have had me on my back with the katana to my throat before I so much as blinked. Hell, if he were serious, he could have killed me the second I raised my makeshift club. This guy was good, shit, he would have to be with the kind of life he lead. But he was no Bruce Lee. Chalk up a point for Nick from the city, average Joe, no one special.

I didn't even attempt to look in his face. I didn't know what I'd see there, if it would raise my hopes or dash them. I'd wait and let this decide it, this final test. I gripped his tattered "Man Cave" shirt in shaking fingers and rolled it up over his shrunken stomach and battered chest, eyes squinting and tearing up as I searched the skin. Damn, it was awful to look at – I could barely see the guy's skin anymore, thanks to all the scar tissue. They obviously had tortured this guy beyond belief.

I'd been in Tumulus for two years and I'd come back with only two scars, and they had been given to me before I'd even gotten there, when my father broke through the trailer window and grabbed me by the neck and the arm to take me away from Niko. This guy was covered in a patchwork of what looked like bite marks, all of them shimmering white pink and hard as scales, making it difficult for me to find what I was looking for.

It was there, the perfectly circular scar ringing the center of his chest, given to my brother by a possessed puck who had wanted to rule the world. Chalk up the winning point to my Nik. "Cyrano, you damn bastard," I groaned in what I'm not sure was joy or pain. He was here, and he was alive. But that didn't mean he hadn't suffered – for thirteen years – because I screwed up. I swore that if we ever made it out of here, I'd make it up to him. Somehow, I'd fix this.

Placing one hand flat against his ruined chest, in the center of the circular scar, I bent to look at his face. He had me by the throat before I could so much as focus. Flipping me over onto my back, he was suddenly straddling me, his eyes blazing, his mouth bracketed with suppressed pain and anger. Shit, he didn't even _look _like Niko, except for the eyes. The eyes were the same as they always had been, except now they looked at me without recognition, like I was the enemy. I had thought I'd seen my brother pissed at me? In comparison to the gaze he was drilling me with now, those glares had been doe-eyed declarations of unequalled love and affection. Damn, it was scary.

"Don't try anything. I wouldn't recommend it," he said, glacier cold.

His stranglehold tightened to grip me under the jaw. I think a lot of his frustration had to do with the fact that I was grinning up at him like an idiot. "You look awful, Nik," I choked through my hysterical grin. "Shit, what would Promise think if she saw you now?" I had to gag off as his fingers cut off all air circulation.

I recognized this tactic. He did it all the time with the revenants and other creatures he wanted to question – choke them long enough to scare them and bring out the fluttering black spots, and then ease up enough to let them whistle down a few short breaths before reapplying pressure. Keep them alive, just barely, and only for as long as it took to get the information he needed. I'd never been on the receiving end of the glare and the death grip before, and damn it if I didn't get freaked as the world began to go hazy at the corners and the blood started pounding in my forehead.

"Cyrano," I gasped, struggling to worm my fingers between his hand and my throat. "Nik . . . It's me, it's Cal." We hadn't recognized each other before, but now – surely . . .

Niko shook his head. "You're insane. I don't know you."

"Sure you do, Nik, I'm – Shit, Nik, I'm your _brother_!" I couldn't breathe. Damn, I couldn't . . . I wheezed pathetically and scrabbled against his grip.

"Nick . . ." Larry's voice from the background, behind the pounding in my ears and Niko's face and the panic in my brain telling me that my brother was strangling me. That he didn't _remember _me.

"Shut up," Niko snapped, and his fingers – impossibly – tightened again, sending a bolt of pain up both my temples. "I deal with him the way I want, Larry. He's crazy, he's violent, and he has to die." Shit, he wasn't going to question me, he was going to kill me. Coldly and sanely going to kill me.


	15. Forgive and Forget

_A/N: Well, I finished _Blackout_. Wow. That was probably the darkest one besides the first. I don't know if I loved it or hated it, because I needed Cal back. Bad Cal, Auphe Cal, not happy, conscience-ridden beach Cal. And did everyone who's reading this think that Niko really needed a good strong hug? Man, that guy is the personification of "amazing". Okay, I'm gushing now, and I should stop. Sorry. _

_Oh, but I had a thought: *SPOILER ALERT * If Cal had "brothers and sisters" that were more Auphe than he was, then why in heck did the Auphe in _Deathwish _tell him he was the "only male Auphe left"? Why didn't they just take the mistakes? I mean, according to Cal from _Blackout_, the Auphe knew where his brothers and sisters were. I am confused. Or is it possible that Rob made a boo-boo? _

**FIFTEEN**

**Forgive and Forget**

Niko's eyes were the same color as mine. It was the only similarity between us, tying my dark hair and pale skin to his light hair and olive tone. I didn't know how he felt about it, but for me – it was like a lifeline. I treasured it, that one piece we shared. But now, as the world began to cloud out and Niko's eyes became the only thing in my rapidly darkening world, I felt a shudder go through me that had nothing to do with the fact that I was dying.

They were so damn empty. So vacant, there was absolutely nothing there, no recognition, no annoyance, no nothing. Nothing for Cal, anyway. There was plenty of hate and loathing for the crazed and murderous person he was currently strangling. Shit, I wondered briefly if Niko had felt this lost when I had been possessed by Darkling? This damn panicky? Of course, the panic could also have something to do with the fact that I hadn't been breathing for several seconds now and it didn't look like my chances for ever getting to again were very good.

"I hate to do this to you, Cyrano," I grunted, and kicked him in the gut. Another move that Niko in his prime would have dodged easily. This Niko, the thirty-six year old equivalent of a concentration camp refugee, flew off of me and rolled to his feet. He was on top of me again in seconds, but this time I was ready for him. I dodged, impossibly fast, too fast for a human.

Niko's rigid-handed chop aimed at my windpipe missed its mark, slicing air instead of my jugular. I'm telling you, it was the weirdest damn feeling. Nik and I had sparred more than we had had heart-to-heart talks. Hell, Nik and I sparred more than we ate together. But I'd never seen that look of murderous hatred in his eyes aimed at me . . . never known that if I let my guard down for a minute he would do more than wipe the apartment floor with my ass. He'd take my life. Without batting an eyelash. Without a single regret. Damn, yeah, it was frigging weird.

And, no surprise, all this thinking was slowing me down. I barely escaped the next blow, falling to the ground as a bony fist slammed into the air where my head had been milliseconds before. I spun like a break dancer and kicked his legs out from under him. I was going to get him down and keep him down until I could talk – or beat, if necessary – some sense into him.

The second his back hit the ground, I leapt on him, straddling him and pinning his arms down with my knees. I braced my hands on either side of his head, ready to use it as leverage against the resistance I knew would come the second he got it through his screwed head that I was on top of him.

"Listen to me, Niko," I said loudly, struggling against him as he tried to get up. No way I was letting him. If I could just make him _listen _to me . . . "Listen to me, Niko, damn it. Your name is Niko Leandros of the Vayash Clan, right? And I'm Cal. Caliban, your brother, your shit-faced, asshole little brother who needs you to wake up now so he can take you back home."

Niko stopped struggling and went limp under me. His eyes opened, pinning me. The emptiness there flickered. "I don't . . . know you," he insisted, but the doubt was there, and that was a good thing. Doubt was my friend. And he wasn't fighting me anymore. Another good thing. Two good things in one second, how much shit could you hope for? I took it and ran.

"_Yes_, you _do_." _Feed the doubt, make it stronger. _"I know where you got that scar on your chest. The circle one. You wanna know? You wanna know where, Nik? It was in a church, under a church. Hob was trying to make that damn gypsy trinket work. It needed gypsy blood. _Your _blood. Cause you are a gypsy. That's why you cut your hair, why you lost your braid." _You're rambling. You're not making sense. Get a grip, Cal. _"You remember? Do you?" _Not good enough. The suspicion's still there. Make it go away. _"Niko frigging Leandros, you're going to remember if I have to slam your head repeatedly on the ground to make you." I grabbed him by the hair at his temples and lifted his head a fraction, with every intent on slamming it down again. He had no _right_, no damn frigging _right_ to forget me. Not after I'd come so far and gone through so much to save his sorry ass. Not after everything we'd been through . . .

"Cal," the word was a gargle at the back of his throat, an unused word for thirteen years.

I kept his head up, bending over to glare at him. "Yes, you dumbass idiot. Cal. Finally. How many times did I have to . . ."

"Cal was in trouble," Niko said quietly, cutting me off. His eyes glazed over with memories fighting to be free from the cage he had put them in. "There was an . . . Auphe. It took me away. I knew Cal would come, I knew he would, but he didn't. That was okay, I didn't want him to. I forgive him. I forgave Cal . . . But Cal didn't _come_." He groaned and tried to close his eyes.

I shook him. "I'm here, I came, Nik, I'm right here, damn it, why can't you see it's me?"

He focused on me, a flicker of the old skepticism back in those hazy gray irises. Ah, good thing. Those brain neurons were back in business. "You're too young to be Cal."

Thirteen years too young. I was supposed to be – what? – thirty-four? Shit, how was I going to explain that? "Cyrano, if I let go of you, could we talk this out? Like, you know, two human beings who aren't trying to kill each other?"

Niko thought about this for a second, then nodded slowly and I released him, rolling off of him and into a defensive position just in case. If there was one thing Niko didn't feel qualms about, it was getting me off my guard during a sparring session. He might do the same now. I couldn't take chances.

He got up stiffly, like he was old. One hand on the floor to brace himself, struggling to get his knees under him, straightening so slowly I almost heard the creak of bones, and finally waiting there a minute, hands covering his face, until he was steady on his feet. Damn, it hurt like hell to see him like that. I didn't know who I was the most mad at – N'zen for taking him here or me for being such a dumbass who screwed his life up every time I breathed. Yeah, me. But N'zen was getting a big helping of brotherly retribution as well, if I could ever find his scrawny treacherous ass.

Niko lowered his hands and peered at me in the darkness. "Come here," he said in a very stern voice, like he had the day four or so years ago when I'd brought home a pet raccoon and it'd pissed in Niko's bed. I hadn't told him about it until the next morning . . . I thought it would be fun seeing him realize he had slept on raccoon piss all night. It hadn't been. Alright, the first part had been. I'd laughed quietly to myself all through his lengthy shower. But after that, after the "Come here" . . . well, he who laughs first laughs worst, or something like that.

I stood in front of my middle-aged brother and stared him down. He was shorter than I was now. I supposed I could chalk that up to good old-fashioned torture and malnourishment. Thirteen years in an Auphe version of a concentration camp would have killed anyone else. It had taken years and a couple of inches from Niko, but he was still alive and that was the important thing. That, and the fact that I was planning on shrinking a couple Auphe of my own with my special half-breed method – namely chopping off limbs and severing torsos and separating heads from shoulders.

I don't know what was going through Niko's mind as he was scrutinizing my face, but his shoulders got even stiffer and he stood even straighter. "Are you really? Tell me the truth. Look me in the eye and tell me. Are you Cal?"

I obeyed him. "I am Cal," I intoned, as if I were chanting one of his damn mantras. "You damn shitting dumbass," I added, hoping it would convince him a little more if I used some of my everyday colloquial.

And the shoulders relaxed again, this time falling into an honest-to-goodness slump. Niko never slumped. Niko never _had _slumped. "You're telling the truth." It wasn't a question. It was a statement. He was satisfied. He believed me. Knew who I was.

So where was the burst of brotherly emotion? Where was the whole man hug, touchy-feely moment that I'd pretend to be grossed out at? It didn't happen, and I didn't ask for it. I didn't deserve it. I'd let him down. I'd arrived thirteen years too late and now the only way that I could make it up to him was try somehow to get him back to New York. Niko obviously didn't think I deserved it either, because he simply stared at me a moment longer, then walked away, out of the ring of torchlight.

"Nick . . ." That was Larry again. I kept forgetting there were people in here. I glanced over at the hairy mountain and wondered briefly what he was thinking of this whole exchange. You had to admit, we both looked crazy. "Nick? You can't go out there. Trolls hunting up there."

Niko continued walking toward the tunnel exit that sloped up through the earth. No one tried to stop him. "Come with me, Caliban."

_Caliban? Since when in hell had he called me Caliban? _I obeyed again, trying not to think of all the implications that could have. Had he forgotten he never called me Caliban? That he only ever insisted upon calling me Cal? Was he distancing himself from me, not sure I was who I said I was? Or was he just so frigging pissed with me for arriving late that he decided I deserved the monster title after all? I wouldn't blame him, not one bit.

We climbed out of the Home, the trip up more difficult than the one down. I clawed my way through the dirt, feeling like some kind of animal emerging from its cave. In a sense, I was. All these men were. We were in Tumulus, a world where humans were the animals to be hunted and the Auphe were the hunters. The Auphe and the trolls and who knew what else? One thing was for certain. Humans were at the bottom of the supernatural food chain. Sheep. Sheep to be slaughtered.

Niko was waiting for me at the top when I finally pulled myself through the underbrush. The sky was still the same red, maybe a little darker around the edges, like someone had burnt it. The trolls were gone, from what I could see. Which was a plus. A plus that was vetoed when I looked over at Niko in the full light of . . . well, what passed for day here.

It really was no wonder I didn't recognize him at first. He really had changed. His face was skinny and scarred up and thirteen years older. He had wrinkles all around his eyes and hanging over his nose. I even saw a bit of gray streaking through the blond of his filthy, stringy hair. Damn, there was _nothing _left of him. If it wasn't for his eyes, the same color as mine still, and the scar on his chest, I'd think I had gotten the wrong guy altogether.

And it was my fault. Every single damn scratch on his emaciated body, every single puckered scar, every single thread of silver inside the gold . . . My shitting fault. I swear, if I hadn't been the sole way for Niko to get out of Tumulus, I'd have killed myself right then. My heart was gone, indistinguishable inside its cloud of blood and shadow. I couldn't feel anything but that blood and shadow, filling me up, making me hurt.

And what scared me shitless was the fact that, although I was standing here right next to him, I didn't know how the hell to start talking. It was like trying to start a conversation with a complete stranger. Even though I'd only seen him hours ago, the years he had spent in Tumulus had pulled us apart.

"Damn it, Cyrano . . ." I began, unsure where I was going.

"Caliban," he interrupted me calmly, not looking at me. Looking at the red horizon. Every word was an effort, I could see that. "Why did you come now? Why not thirteen years ago and why not at all? Why now?" I opened my mouth to answer but he held up a hand. "And if you are going to lie about it, then I would rather you not say anything at all."

That's the second time he said he didn't want me to lie. Shit, I didn't lie to Niko, not when I knew he'd believe me. I never kept anything from him. Hell, he'd diapered my frigging ass when I was a baby, we didn't _have _secrets. "I'd never lie to you, Niko," I told him somberly.

That got him. He turned around to face me, icy as if he were facing a revenant who had attempted to take a bite out of him. "How many times did you tell me you cared about me? Shown me if not said it?"

I kept eye contact with him, willing him to continue. I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted him to say it and get it off his chest. He always had to blow off his steam before he could get back to being his annoying, anal-retentive self again. But there was another reason I wanted him to say it: I wanted to feel the sting of his blame, I wanted my just desserts dished up without trying to soften the blow. I deserved it, every single gut-wrenching word.

"Weren't all those times a lie, every single one? Weren't they proven lies by the years I spent in that stinking room, waiting for you to come and find me?" He was breathing in spurts, his eyes going red. Damn it, Niko was trying not to cry. That didn't happen. It just didn't. "You_ deserted _me, Caliban. So I decided to forget you. I forgave you, but I couldn't think about you anymore without dying inside every time. Every . . . damn . . . time." He turned his back to me and looked back at the horizon.

And by forgetting me, he had forgotten himself. He'd said over and over again that I'd made him who he was. Without me as the superglue, the whole self-image fell apart. Damn, I was about to fall apart myself. Forget about not softening the blow. It was too much to take, too much for Niko to take. "Nik, listen to me, just for one frigging minute, will you?" I placed myself in front of him and gripped his shoulder.

He jerked away from me and tried to walk past me, his eyes still on that horizon.

"You're being like a damn kid, Niko. Cut it out, you're acting like a spoiled kid. Listen to me, will you? Just for one damn second?" I grabbed his wrist tightly enough to let him know I wasn't letting go unless he listened to me first.

Niko, rigid once again, stopped trying to free himself and looked up at me, his eyes full of hurt and anger. "You have nothing to say to me."

"Like hell I do . . ."

"I don't want excuses," he sighed, bone-tired and wracked by more pain than any one human frame could be expected to bear. "Go back to New York, Caliban."

Without him. Go back to New York without him. "What the f . . ."

"I want to stay here. I have a responsibility to the men here. They need me to survive. You obviously don't." There was no accusation in his remark, only cold observance, a stating of facts. Like he was reading out one of his damn books. I loosened my hold on his wrist and his hand fell away from mine.

Suddenly I was fed up, sick as shit, with his self-righteous attitude. So he had suffered. So he'd been here thirteen years. Screw that, screw all of that. And screw the guys waiting back in that hole under the ground. They needed him, did they? _They _needed him? There'd been a time where Niko would have sacrificed the world for me. That time was obviously over. But that didn't mean I couldn't sacrifice it for him.

"I'll make you go," I snapped, getting in front of him again. Hell, why did he keep turning away from me? "I can. You saw what I did down there in the Home. I beat your frigging ass. I'm stronger than you are, and faster, and damn it if I won't _make you go home_."

"You can't make me do anything," Niko said, eyes flaring. "I have nothing left back there. Do you think Promise will have anything to do with me now?" He ran a hand down his worn shirt, feeling the scars underneath it puckering his flesh and warping his body.

"Is _Promise _who you're frigging _thinking _about? You're thinking about shitting _Promise_?"

"Caliban . . ."

"_I _need you, Nik. Hell, why can't you see that's why I came after you?"

"Thirteen years seems to be a long time to get on without someone you need," Niko snapped. "When did you finally realize you needed me, Caliban? When you couldn't find your damn bed because no one had picked up your dirty clothes for you?"

I punched him. I couldn't help it, the world had gone red and angry and I punched my brother in the damn mouth that was flapping so much shit. As he toppled backward in surprise, I let loose. I started yelling. "Shut that shit, Niko. Just shut it. You want to know how I got here? The second after that damn Auphe took you I made a gate to Tumulus. The _second _after. I gated here so fast I forgot to bring a damn weapon. But I opened the frigging gate too late in time, Nik. I thought I was right behind you, okay, have you got that? But it was too late, I'd ripped time as well as space, somehow. I acted rashly, without thinking, and yeah, I'm sorry about that. But I'm _here _now. And can you please stop dealing that shit about me not needing you? Hell, Cyrano, I thought you were dead an hour ago. You know how that made me feel? You wanna know what Hell feels like? It isn't Tumulus, Cyrano." I was shaking now, breathless from my shouting, hands clenched at my sides. Niko, from his sprawled sitting position on the barbed grass, stared at me, an unreadable expression on his face.

I fell to my knees beside him, gripped him by the arm, and rested my forehead against his shoulder. He stank. Gone were the smells of food and the outdoors and that oil he polished his weapons with. He smelled a step away from death.

"It isn't Tumulus, and I'm sorry I hit you." I closed my eyes and waited for him to shrug me away and get up and tell me to go back to my frigging life, go back to New York, to forget about him. Because the truth was he didn't want me, he wanted to forget about me.

He didn't shift away, though. He stayed frozen beneath me, wondering what to do. I felt his hand cup the back of my neck, then, threading his thin fingers through my hair.

"And what happened exactly to all those years of caution I remember trying to pound into your sorry excuse for a brain?" he muttered through a quickly swelling lip.

I opened my mouth to say something, but only a whoosh of relieved breath came out. It hurt to breathe. In my chest, it hurt. I thought maybe I was going to cry, too, and that wasn't right either.

"I can't go back with you, Cal," he said, and yeah, he was using my name again. But that didn't soften the blow of what he said.

I pulled back. "What? Why in hell not?"

"Because I can't be Nik anymore. I can't be Cyrano, and that would be too hard, for both of us." His gray eyes were solemn and uncompromising. I couldn't believe he was saying this. I wanted to hit him again. He pressed on. "Thirteen years in a place like this can be a lifetime. I've changed, for the worse, and I couldn't come back and play the part of your big brother like nothing ever happened. It wouldn't be fair to me, and it certainly wouldn't be fair to you."

Niko drew a breath and got shakily to his feet again. I wanted to help him. It took everything in my power not to offer my hand and drag him to his feet. But that would have shamed him. I pretended instead that I didn't notice, as I waited for him to steady himself against a nearby tree and answer my question.

When he finally was completely in control of his balance, he eyed me with a look that, while it wasn't the Niko I knew, was a damn sight closer to it than it had been in the Home. I realized then that I wouldn't ever get him back. That he was who he was now, and I had to accept him as that or leave him. And that wasn't any kind of choice at all. So I'd accept him. I'd cope. And maybe one day he'd find himself again. If I tried hard enough.

_What kind of an asshole are you? Giving up. That's what this is, and don't try to convince yourself it's any kind of heroic gesture of self-sacrifice or stubbornness either. Because you know what you have to do. You know and you're scared because you don't want to take the chance of losing him. _

It was true, every word of it. I knew what I could do, and it was a gamble. Hell, it was probably the biggest gamble ever spawned in or out of Vegas. It was a million to one, and I just might be chickenshit enough to take the "one" and walk away without even trying for the million. Because if I missed my mark, if something went wrong, then even the one disappeared and I was alone. Again. For the third time today. Shit, I didn't know if I could take it.

But then I felt Niko staring at me and I knew that for him, I'd try it. For him, because in the end he was all that mattered - the one and the million and everything else rolled up in between. Damn it, I loved the asshole, and I couldn't just let this go without giving it one more shot. Never put your gun down, and always have that extra clip just in case. For one last shot.

"Nik," I said firmly, brooking no argument. "Nik, can you tell me exactly what that place looked like that they kept you? Exactly where you were for thirteen years? I mean, down to the color of the mold on the walls?" I paused. "I need your okay on this because I don't know if it will work or not. Screwing with time and history is crazy shit, and we both might end up dead. But I can't stand you like this, Cyrano. You're broken. You're . . . not you. Not how you should be. "

He raised an eyebrow fractionally. He was listening, but either he didn't know where this was going or he simply wanted to hear me say it. Well, screw it, I'd say it. Big deal. He'd find out when I blinked out of existence anyway. He'd figure out where I'd gone, what I'd planned.

"I'm getting you back, Nik. I'm going to go back in time and I'm going to get you back."


	16. The Nik of Time

_A/N: Sorry I haven't updated in several days. I started this fan fiction while I was in a writing rut with nothing else to keep me occupied. Now I've started work on a new novel and it's taking up a lot of my time. That, plus finals, plus a problem with easy internet access recently . . . Yeesh. But fear not, I won't desert you. _

_Oh, and just for the record, this fan fiction is now only 1,152 words away from qualifying as novel-length (40,000 words)! Woot! Woot! XD _

**SIXTEEN**

**The Nik of Time**

"No."

Yeah, shit, what a surprise. He didn't want me to go. Well, hell. "Um, yeah, Cyrano. Sorry. My mind's made up."

Niko crossed the distance between us in two strides. He gripped my collar in his fist and dragged me closer, his face marble-hard and set as stone. I'd seen him like this the first day I'd told him I was planning on getting laid. I had been fourteen and I'd been seeing this girl, swapping spit. I'd wanted to take it to the next level – she'd wanted it too. Niko'd been home from college over the weekend when I'd told him. I'd been stupid enough to think he'd be up to the idea.

He'd gripped me as he was doing now, and let me know on no uncertain terms that if I ever went ahead with it he'd make me sorry. Scenes of neutering – snip, snip – flashed through my poor innocent brain. Needless to say, the threat took effect and I remained a virgin to the ripe old age of twenty.

Unfortunately, Niko was in for a disappointment this time.

"It's too dangerous," he insisted. "Forget about me, Cal, go back to New York. It's too late. What's done is done. You've already screwed up the future, don't do the same with the past, _especially _to the risk of your own life."

"This isn't about me, Nik, it's about you. For once in our frigging lives it's not about my life. Share and share alike, right? I got you into this mess and I'm going to get you out."

"_Forget about me_," he all but shouted into my face. "Damn it, Cal, just _go home._"

_You are home. _"For you it might have been thirteen years, Nik," I said, easing his hands off my shirt and stepping away. "For me it was less than a day. People don't forget about people in a day. People don't desert people in a day. And I'm not even 'people', thanks to my dad. If there's one thing I've learned about the Auphe, they don't give up easy. Something I must have inherited."

He didn't tell me not to equate myself with them. What that meant, I don't know. Whether it was because all those years of denial were borne of an uncertainty about whether or not I actually was and his time as captive to them asserted the inarguable difference in his mind, or whether he simply didn't care enough about my fragile mental condition any longer, he didn't say anything. He only stared me down.

"You know it won't work anyway," he said. "You need to be able to see where you're going in your mind. You need to be able to envision it."

"It will work," I said calmly, "because you're going to tell me about it."

"Like hell I will," Niko snapped, surprising me. Cursing, now? He was serious. Of course he was serious, it was his little brother's life that hung in the balance – at least some things stayed the same. My safety over his happiness. Just like always. Like shitting always. But I didn't have to take it now. He had given his whole life away to take care of me, and now he was willing to go on living in a hole in the ground in a place that made Hell look like a frigging daisy field to keep me safe.

It wasn't happening. It wasn't freaking happening, not when I'd sworn responsibility, not when I'd promised myself I'd get Niko back. I owed him. Damn, how I owed him. I wasn't planning on backing out now, technicalities or no.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to voice any of the emotions running through my worn and broken-down mind. The men from the Home began pouring out of their hiding place, weapons drawn. At first, I thought they were for me. Then Larry, who led the way, threw Nik his katana and barked one word: "Wolves."

"There are freaking werewolves here, too?" I demanded of Niko as he caught his sword and turned to me.

"They do the Hellspawn's work, capturing food and playthings when their masters are too busy elsewhere," Larry told me.

"Get into the Home." Niko was flashing his blade around, getting a feel for it again.

"Shit, no."

"Caliban, I mean it."

And there was my full freaking name again. Damn, I hated the way it sounded coming out of his mouth. Just one more reason why I had to go back in time. Then again, maybe I would get into the Home . . . Running away from a fight, running away from my _brother _was a heretofore unknown experience. And it would hurt like hell. But the important thing was getting to a place where Niko couldn't stop me from gating to the past . . .

And the Wolves came. They burst through the trees, a ragtag mixture of humans, half-humans, and animals. Apparently they had a system worked out. Those in wolf form would take the prey down, the humans would bind them and carry them back, with the half-humans doing a pleasant mixture of the two. Lucky ducks, those guys – they get to incapacitate and secure. Variety is the spice of life and shit.

The Home men were good, I'd give them that. Not as good as we were. Back in our world, in our time, Robin and Niko and I could have taken out this many in the semi-darkness, waist-deep in water – those gold and silver days. These men were half-starved (or more) and their weapons were little more than crudely whittled sticks. Still they made a dent in the Wolves, taking several down for every one of their own that fell.

Niko was a blur in comparison. So he _could _still fight like hell on occasion. That was good to know. I, on the other hand, had no weapon. Which could prove a problem.

_Shit_, I thought eloquently, as a fully formed Wolf leapt at me. Niko pushed me down, straddled me, and skewered the Wolf as it landed on his outthrust blade. With a roar of primal rage – something that I would never have expected from the Zen king's lips – Niko flicked the carcass at several of the creature's advancing companions. They went over like ten-pins. All that was missing was the cartoon clatter of the bowling alley.

Niko, still standing over me, didn't look at me as he continued hacking at would-be attackers. "We're going to move back to the Home. Get up and keep behind me."

"Nick, we could use some help over here," Larry hollered from several yards away. He and Crazy Reggie and some others were backed up against a tightly-packed clump of trees, most of the remaining Wolves converging on them. The guys were swinging their sticks in stupid heroism, but it wasn't going to be enough. I could see that.

Niko tensed as I slid out from under his straddling legs and stood behind him. He was torn. I was his brother, yeah, sure, but I'd been less than a memory for more than a decade and these guys – they were his new family, the people he had devoted this part of his life to. And they were about to become the world's largest pile of Alpo. I had a feeling the only reason he wasn't dashing over there at this moment was out of habit. _Protect little brother_, had been etched into his brain, and the maxim was kicking in now.

"Go, Nik," I urged, trying to ignore the silent tearing sound coming from inside my chest. I wanted Niko with me, it was the way it was supposed to be. But – maybe I was living in the past. And if Nik didn't get a move on, those guys wouldn't be living at all. "They need you more than I do. I can take care of myself, I'll get into the Home. Make a break for it." I slammed the heel of my hand in between his shoulder blades, and he nearly stumbled forward a step. It was sickly funny – a day ago (for me, anyway) something like that wouldn't have budged him. "Go on, you idiot. Or are you chickenshit?" A little goading never hurt a cause.

"Take this," Niko turned quickly and pressed the katana into my hand.

"What about you?"

Niko knelt and picked up a stick one of the guys had dropped, flipping it around in his hand. "This'll do." And he left. Just like that. The guy who would let the world burn to save my ass walked away from me.

Spinning around quickly, my ears picking up on the clumsy movements of my attacker, I took a fully human Wolf out, not even caring about the bloodshot eyes and the tortured expression on the lean, starved face. I wasn't interested in pity. I was too damn upset to let it bother me. I pretended it was N'zen. N'zen did this. N'zen stole my brother from me more effectively than if he had killed him.

And he was going to pay.

Right . . . now.

I built a gate around me. Niko hadn't told me what it had looked like, the place he'd been held captive, but I figured that in a pinch I couldn't be worried about specifics. I'd picture Niko like he'd been when the pasty-assed demon had taken him from me, in a little room, in Tumulus. And – if it was meant to be – I'd be with him in seconds.

If it wasn't meant to be and the gate opened a great messy hole into nothingness and I tumbled headlong into a void that swallowed me whole and sucked my life out of my body, then that would be okay, too. Hell, anything would be better than this.

The gray was growing around me, framing my body. A Wolf who had been running toward me yelped and swerved away, crying for its mommy because here was a boy who looked like a human and traveled like an Auphe. How frightening. Run, Wolf, run.

Niko was halfway to his jeopardized friends when he stopped and turned, eyes wide. Don't ask me how he sensed the gate, but he did. He turned and he saw it opening behind me, around me, swirling like a dust devil made out of space and time.

I lifted a hand to wave a jaunty goodbye – anything but what I felt like doing, but hell, he didn't have to know that, did he? – and saw my fingers edged in glowing gray. Niko started running back toward me, even as the first Wolf jumped up on Larry and buried its snout in the man mountain's hairy throat.

_Stay back, oh, damn it, stay back, Niko! _I thought, or maybe I shouted it. I did not want him coming with me. I was going back to save one Niko, I didn't need to be worrying about two. Besides, this was for him. The only reason I was doing this was so that Nik could get a second chance. If I saved him in the past, this Niko – I was guessing – would wink out of existence. If I died before I could reach him, Niko'd be able to go on like he was now. Not the best existence, but an existence anyway. If he came . . . "Stay _back_, you _idiot_!" I shouted above the howling wind that was suddenly ripping at my clothes and my hair and my voice.

I'd have moved back if I could have, but I was caught in that single second of frozen time before you disappear. Niko lunged, arm outstretched, and slammed into me the instant before the gate was completed.

"Bastard," I heard him grunt, and then we were falling and the world winked out around us.

I had no idea what would happen to him if we broke contact, so I wrapped an arm across his sunken chest as we tumbled – up, down, side to freaking side, every way you could imagine and several thousand besides. My other hand kept a tight grip on the katana he'd given me. If we ever made it out to the other side, I had a hunch we'd need it.


	17. The Bridge

_A/N: And we reach 40,000 words! My fanfic is now a novel, one I'd like to dedicate to airyie and kooie, both of whom have been here from the beginning, and my more recent and just as valuable followers Gohzangirl and Lilynette, both of whom are stellar reviewers! Thank you, thank you, thank you! _

**SEVENTEEN**

**The Bridge **

I landed on my hands and knees. I don't think I'd ever fallen out of a gate before, at least not before today's two epic travels. Step through, step out, piece of cake. This time – like it had been when I first entered Tumulus – it was a less than graceful landing. Only _this_ time, there wasn't any endless plain, no nice wide landing pad. Instead, I got a thin rock bridge spanning a cavern that plunged both ways into pitch darkness. We gated directly over the middle of the bridge. One meter to the left or right and we would have fallen to our deaths, or asphyxiated while we were still falling. That looked like a damn long way down. And there was no way that I could have opened a second gate; I barely had enough strength to freaking stand, let alone tear another hole in space.

"You frigging bastard," I gulped, still on my hands and knees, dragging in air. It stank, like rotten meat hanging on the bone by a few maggot-ridden strands. "You frigging came. I told you . . . not to come."

Niko was on his knees and breathing hard. I could see him in the dim red nightmare glow that spiderwebbed across the walls that surrounded the bridge like trickles of lava.

"I told you not to come," I hissed again, afraid to raise my voice.

"And I told you know to go."

Alright, I admittedly didn't have an answer to that. I'd let it go, for the moment. But when – if, I corrected myself – if we ever got out of here, I'd give him hell about it. Either him or the other him, the real him, the one I had come to rescue. I changed the subject. "How'd I get here? I've never seen this place before in my life." It hadn't been what I was picturing, either – Niko in a tiny room.

"I brought us here," Niko splayed his fingers on the rock, looking reluctant to get up. I knew why. His balance was off. He was afraid he'd tumble off the side of the narrow bridge if he stood. Not like the dumbass was going to ask for help or anything, though.

"You did?" I decided I'd have to be the strong one now and got to my feet. After a second of shuffling around to find my footing – my own balance wasn't so great at the moment – I steadied myself and straightened. I still gripped the katana in my fist. No way I was letting go of it now, in the middle of dark creepy freaking hell.

I offered my brother my free hand and he hesitated. Damn, I wasn't going to get used to this new Niko any time soon. He obviously was reluctant to put himself into any kind of position in which he needed to trust me. He'd come with me, yeah, sure, but trust me? I guess I couldn't blame him, after what he'd thought I'd done. What I _had _done, thanks to my screwing time up. I knew I wouldn't be as forgiving if someone let me down like that.

That, of course, didn't mean I was going to stand passively and take this shit. I pushed my hand a little farther out. "Cyrano, take my shitting hand." I wasn't putting up with this. Or was risking my freaking neck to save his miserable ass not proof enough that what I had done had been an honest-to-God mistake?

Niko stared at the hand as though I'd possibly coated it with radioactive acid, then gripped it and we hauled him to his feet. I kept my grip firm until he steadied himself and dragged his hand from mine. Okay. Fine. I wouldn't bitch right now. I had enough on my plate trying to keep us both alive.

"You were saying?" I prompted, making sure he was steady before stepping away and hefting the katana.

"I brought us here," Niko told me, eyes scanning both sides of the bridge as though deep in thought. Or remembering.

"Yeah, I got that part. What I don't get is why you didn't take us right to you. Why drop us in the middle of nowhere."

"Did you intend to rescue me or simply die slowly with me?" When I didn't answer, he sighed long-sufferingly. "You don't enter a jail cell to break someone out. You have to do it from the outside. If I were to bring you to where I was being held, you couldn't do anything to get me out. Besides," he said grimly, "it's not big enough for three men to fit in it."

God, that hurt. Being stuck in a room so small for thirteen years, the guy who'd run ten miles a day, who'd exercise himself sweatless, move for the sake of moving . . . telling himself I was coming and then finally forgetting me, letting the memory of me dissipate into the darkness around him. If I let myself, I could have gone running down the bridge – regardless of the direction – and slaughtered the first things I'd come into contact with.

"Caliban."

I didn't remember much about my own stay in Tumulus, but tiny little rooms didn't ring the metaphorical bell. More like dizzyingly high, ceilingless chambers that were so big you couldn't touch a wall if you walked with your arms stretched out for five minutes. Just blackness, cold inky blackness that swirled around you and made you so damn dizzy you'd fall to your knees just to get back the feeling of the ground beneath you. And then there was always the possibility that the Auphe were following you silently, laughing at your attempts to escape, ready to pounce and pull you back . . . Damn, how did I remember that?

Now I was the one reeling. I brought up my hand to brush my hair and the memory from my eyes. Niko reached over and gripped my shirt to stop me stepping off the bridge. I looked up at him and knew my face was probably radiating pallor – more so than usual, that is.

"Shit, sorry. Don't know where that came from." I regained my footing and straightened. "So. Which way. I'm assuming you know where to go. Because I'm lost as hell."

"I know which way," Niko said vehemently, glaring into the darkness beyond me. "But there might be a slight delay in our plans. I don't remember, did I teach you how to use the katana?"

"Nik, I'm not strictly an explosive rounds guy, I've handled swords before."

"Good. You might want to begin implementing whatever skills you seem to believe you possess," Niko pointed behind me, years in captivity obviously doing nothing to impair his immense vocabulary.

I turned and saw familiar red eyes floating across from the dim eastward end of the bridge. Auphe. I grinned. Perfect. Here was hoping N'zen was with them. The eyes kept coming. How many were there, anyway? It looked like someone had thrown the rock in the demonic beehive. I counted fifteen pairs of eyes before I gave up. Shit. The bridge of Khazad-freaking-dúm. I felt like screaming "Elendil" or something. But Gandalf – the lucky stiff – only had to deal with one monster. We had – what, thirty? Freaking hobbits didn't know how good they'd got it.

The Auphe were moving slow, probably not sure who or what the hell we were. Had humans ever been in their lair as anything but limp and helpless prey? Probably not. I was all about breaking the mold. That and several dozen Auphe necks.

Niko was making noises behind me, deep primal grumblings in his throat. Niko, the silent ninja killer had gone all-out predator. I reached back and touched his arm. "We can take these guys."

"They killed me a hundred times over," Niko moaned. "Oh, God, I can't do this."

"You can do anything," I assured him, like he had assured me when I was seven and I told him I couldn't stand for him to take a splinter out of my finger. "Hell, you're the Super Sexy Boogeyman Slayer."

"I'm the . . . what?" That snapped him out of it, at least temporarily. Good. And all the while the Auphe were getting closer. I lifted the katana and let the light from the glowing red freakish fungus reflect off of it. Give the bastards a little something to chew before I took that faculty away from them.

"This isn't smart," Niko told me suddenly. "We can't fight them. You just gated and I'm not exactly in my prime. There are twenty five Auphe minimum coming across this bridge. Most likely it won't even come to fighting. One false step and we fall over the edge."

"Welcome back to the world of the living," I muttered, realizing that he was probably right. This wasn't going to help save my brother. "So what do we do? Ask them to stop?"

"Run," he grated. He stepped aside, balancing inches from the edge of the bridge to let me get past him.

"Together," I told him.

He nodded once. "I just want you ahead of me."

Beyond that ingrained _Protect little brother _mode, it made sense. I was the only one who could get Niko back anyway. I was the key to the real world. And if you were going to make sure something was safe, it was going to be the key. Basic principle.

I slid in front of him and took off across the bridge as fast as I could without risking losing my balance. I could just see how that particular scene would play out. Yeah, shit, I'm falling to my death but at least I escaped the Auphe, right? I heard Niko behind me, breathing hard. He hadn't thrown up after coming through the gate, hadn't even retched. But that didn't mean the travel hadn't taken it out of him. And now he was running for his life. It was his own frigging fault for bothering to come with me after I had told him I didn't want him.

"Is this the right way?" I demanded.

"No . . . the other way." He said it dead serious.

"Shit."

"But there are passages running all through here . . . a whole network. We can . . . get to one . . . make our way back once we've lost them."

"You're actually thinking of _losing _them?" I hollered. No use wondering if you'll be heard or not when the enemy shitting _sees _you.

"We've lost them before."

True. Over and over we'd lost them, if only for a little while at a time. But that was in New York City. That was in our world. This was their turf, and I'd be willing to bet they'd have every nook and cranny memorized in their shriveled black little hearts.

_But_, I reminded myself as an internal map suddenly spread itself open inside my head, a GPS flickering to life after years of dormancy. _Maybe so do I. _


	18. My Brother's Keeper

_A/N: Sorry, I would have posted this last night but my internet connection whacked out. XO So, here it is, in the morning for a change! _

**EIGHTEEN **

**My Brother's Keeper **

The bridge ended on a ledge that ran the length of the wall. There were several doorways that looked like cave mouths. I stopped for a minute, hearing the Auphe not far behind, keeping slightly back, probably nervous. They'd felt me gate, I realized. They were uncertain because they didn't know what I was. Probably they remembered me.

"Remember me, bastards?" I muttered, eyes scanning the passage. It was oddly bright, the phosphorescent fungi doing a lot to light the way. The Auphe version of accent lighting – a little taste of volcanic hell, what wouldn't that do for your décor?

I concentrated hard on that internal GPS, trying to sense which one to take. Right now a wrong choice could be fatal. No surprises there. When was there ever such a thing as a choice without life-altering (or life-ending) consequences, especially in _my _life? But it was kind of difficult to take my time and scan each entrance with all hell literally on our heels.

"What are you waiting for?" Niko urged, his hand clenching my shoulder.

"Looks like my Auphe half isn't so useless after all," I muttered, moving off to the left. "This way. This is the way."

"Baby humans," cried a glass voice from the bridge. It was followed by it's brothers' jeers. "Run, run, you cannot hide."

Niko's hand tightened. I pulled us into the right – or what I fervently hoped was the right – cave mouth. It stank like a year's worth of my laundry fermenting in the humidity of our un-air-conditioned apartment, but I could feel that it was right. Something clicked.

The passage ran steeply up through the rock, twisting leftward and up higher and out of sight. How on earth did the damn fungus light this up? I started forward, but Niko's hand stopped me, still dragging at my shirt.

"How can you see?" he demanded softly.

"You can't?"

"No, it's too dark."

I swallowed. I could guess. I was more Auphe than I thought. "I'm – uh – making an educated guess. Induction, or some shit like that. Remember what the difference between induction and deduction is, Cyrano? I had hell with that in eleventh grade." All this talking to distract us both from the fact that I could see in the dark. I couldn't before, not back in our world. Maybe being in Tumulus brought out the Auphe in me. I had also been moving oddly fast as well . . . it could be considered an advantage now, I just prayed that my human half would kick in again once we got back to Earth.

The whistling of core wind laden with glass and metal followed us as we stumbled up the steep incline, our hands braced against the wall for balance.

"Can't hide, baby humans. Pupae. Larvae. We will suck your flesh from your bones. We will pull your eyes and your tongues from your heads and give them to our mates to play with."

Niko's voice was husky, his hand moving from my shoulder to my back and then to my shoulder again. Making sure I was still there. "Stay with me, Caliban."

"I'm staying, calm down." I wondered if he'd known what they'd said. They were speaking Auphe, a language I'd known since my first extended visit with good old dad. Niko'd always had a fascination for languages – I actually suspected that through his intensive study he was trying to come up with some kind of dialect similar to Auphe, mixing languages, digging down to the roots, trying to find origins. Anything to know thine enemy. He no doubt had picked up on the Auphe language as fast if not faster than I had. "Come on, Cyrano. Induction and deduction. Don't tell me years of living like a savage has robbed you of the basic strategies of rhetorical technique." Impressive sentence, lots of big words. I'd have to memorize that, throw it at the real Niko's face when – _if_ – we escaped.

"Induction . . . is supposition drawn from evidence of . . . of . . ." There was a pause as we rounded the bend. "I don't remember."

_He doesn't remember. He doesn't . . ._"Of course you remember," I told him in the teacher voice he had used so often with me. "You're just not _applying _yourself."

"Larvae . . ." The droning call echoed up behind us.

"Bastards," I spat. "Nik, why in hell are you _behind _me? I'm the one with the weapon." _And I'm also the one who can see in the dark. _I was needed in front and behind. Once again, I cursed my damn brother for insisting to come along. I sighed and passed the katana back. "You take this. You'll do more damage than I would anyway. If it comes to that."

"If it comes to that," Niko snorted cynically, but he took the katana and his breathing steadied instantly, making me wonder why in hell I hadn't handed him his freaking security blanket sooner.

The tunnel leveled out and stretched as far as I could see. Just as we came to the flat stretch, the Auphe behind us leapt forward, their excited chittering filling the passageway.

"Now we run," I told Niko.

The tunnel was wide enough that we could run shoulder-to-shoulder, which I made sure was the way it went. Niko was painfully slow, or maybe that was just me and my new Auphe speedometer talking. To me it seemed like a crawl. I wished I could sling my brother over my shoulder and dart away, because if we didn't pick up our asses soon we'd be scraping them up off the floor with our own teeth. If we had teeth left . . .

"Too fast," Niko panted, starting to go double from what I guessed was a stitch in his side. Hell, did Niko Leandros have the genetic makeup for stitches? Besides the needle and suture type, that is? Well, honestly, what could I expect from a man thirteen years confined to a tiny chamber? The fact he wasn't a paralytic did testimony to his iron constitution. "Go on without me."

"Like Hell I'm going on without you," I gripped his elbow and thrust him slightly ahead of me, keeping him up to pace. "You decided to invite yourself on my pleasure cruise so you're not backing out now."

"Caliban . . ." He stopped running, stopped walking, just stood there. I skidded to a halt and whipped around to face him.

"Get your damn feet moving, you dumbass," I gritted out. "Don't make me knock you out and carry you piggyback."

Niko swallowed. I could see his every feature with my new and improved Auphe night vision. He was in pain, in every way you could think of. Mental, physical, emotional . . . every damn part of the guy was hurting. He couldn't stay here.

"Niko . . ."

The Auphe were getting closer, slowing their gait once again now that we'd stopped. Another thing humans usually didn't do in Auphe company, stop running. I doubted the Auphe knew that human anatomy consisted of more than an ass and a pair of flying legs.

"Save me, Caliban. Find me and bring me back." He hefted the katana and turned to face the Auphe.

I grabbed his arm and yanked him back to face me. His eyes were serene, so damn frigging serene. "You're not staying here. Damn it, Cyrano, I can't walk away from you. Don't you know that it isn't physically frigging possible?"

"You're not walking away from me," Niko objected mildly. "You're walking toward me. Or preferably running, as most of these Auphe are most likely going to follow you anyway. The least I can do is hold off those I can."

"You're not . . ."

"I am able." He swung the katana.

"Yeah, and I'm Cain," I muttered. _Am I my brother's keeper? _The short answer? Yeah, hell, I was. And this was killing me.

The Auphe drew back slightly, chittering amongst themselves. Either they were nervous or they wanted to see the final bitter parting. I'd lay my money on the second one. This was probably the most entertainment the Auphe had had in ages. Fun, fun, fun.

There really was no choice. It was stay here and die with this Niko, or go ahead and take my chance finding the other Niko. My Niko, who, I reminded myself, was in a cell barely big enough to hold him, telling himself that I was on my way.

Yeah, that pushed me off the edge. If I stayed here with this Niko, the other Niko would just become the broken, willfully amnesiac this guy was. I couldn't doom him to that, to thirteen years. I just . . . couldn't.

"Yeah. You're right." I motioned to the rusted katana. "Hold on to it. We'll come back this way. Just hold them off for as long as you can, I won't be too long." _Although how Niko is going to feel being confronted by his doppelganger, I'm not so certain. _

Niko nodded and, after a second, I turned to go.

"Caliban."

"Caliban, Caliban," the Auphe echoed evilly, like this was some kind of freaking comedy and they were repeating a favorite joke.

"What is it."

"If this doesn't work out. If somehow you don't make it and I need to live out my life over," Niko said slowly, stepping away from me and toward the Auphe, "I'm sorry I'm going to forget you. I should have known better."

"Yeah," I grunted, not knowing what else to say to that.

Then I ran, the Auphe attacked, and I didn't look back as I rounded the corner, hearing several dozen pairs of bare feet slithering after me. I was on my own now, one brother before me and one behind me. "Hold on, Nik," I whispered, not sure which one I was talking to.


	19. Never Caliban

_A/N: Hello, people :) I am afraid that this is going to be the last chapter for a couple of days. I have three days left of school and I have to catch up on several things over the weekend as well. I'll probably post the next chapter Tuesday or Wednesday. Hang in there ;) _

**NINETEEN**

**Never Caliban **

Right now I was pretty much on autopilot. No longer was I trying to decide which way to go out of the many different tunnels branching off from the one I was running through. When you've got a swarm of chittering, blood-thirsty, metal-toothed creatures coming after you, it kind of discourages standing in thought and peering at the map.

But I knew I was going the right way. My Auphe genes, given free rein, were guiding my feet in what I knew was the correct direction. Who knew I could make my Auphe part so compliant? I might have to take advantage of this in the future – I stopped myself before I could continue with that train of thought. Firstly, I didn't even know if I was going to get a freaking future. Secondly, the minute Nik and I were out of here I was chucking my new-found talents right back where they came from. No way I was going to let myself become _more _Auphe than I needed to be, even if it would be handy as shit every once in a blue moon.

"Caliban, Caliban," mimicked the Auphe behind me. I didn't know if they were simply mocking Niko, or if they actually remembered me. But – and bite me if this sounds cliché, I had more important things in mind than trying to come up with new and unusual figures of speech – I wasn't about to stop and ask them which it was.

There was something else guiding me as well. I could feel it, the trail of thread that Greek babe left in the maze for the guy who fought the half-man, half-cow thing. Perseus, I think, right? See? Niko could bitch about my lack of concentration all he wanted. I remembered stuff. Anyway, the thread. It ran through the corridors, running along with my own Auphe equivalent of a Smartphone. A light at the end of the tunnel, one I could feel and not see. Strength and safety and Niko.

Shit, what kind of person emits a frigging aura? If I didn't have proof on several different occasions that Niko was all human . . .

I glanced up suddenly, my instincts telling me to do so. A hole in the wall, that's what had set my internal blinker on. It was too dark inside to see where it went, if it went anywhere at all. It could be a cookie cupboard, but I doubted it. Not that I had time to doubt. I needed to get my ass moving because both Nikos' lives were in the balance here. I had to save one so I could go back for the other. Ever heard of too much of a good thing? Well, there were one too many frigging Niks around for my taste – for my sanity.

_You'd wanted responsibility, _I reminded myself dolefully.

I shot a glance over my shoulder. The Auphe rounded the corner. With my new infrared vision, I could see them not as shadows but for what they really were. They tumbled into the passage like a miniature avalanche. I'd take the avalanche any day. Snow didn't have teeth. Snow didn't want to rip out your intestines and make frigging necklaces out of them.

_They're not gating_, I thought. _Why in hell aren't they gating? _

Because the thrill of the chase is all the fun. Or if you're Auphe, only half the fun. The other half is comprised of catching and eating the prey while it's still screaming for its mommy. Well, unfortunately these guys weren't going to get the full experience, then, because I'd let them chase me but shit if I was going to let them _catch _me.

I jumped into the hole, the ease with which I levered myself off the ground and propelled myself squarely into the crevice startling me. Shit, it wasn't supposed to be that easy. Not like I was complaining. Now that I was in the hole, I could see it was a passage. Long and sloping upward and so narrow that it looked like I'd have to slither through on my belly.

I'm not claustrophobic. I'm just not. But sometimes claustrophobia isn't needed. My heart sped up and my head felt as though it were shrinking around my bulging, panicking brain as I wormed headfirst into the tiny tunnel, feeling thousands of tons of rock pressing against my body from all sides.

My breath was coming short. I could hear the Auphe chuckling into the hole, rasping amongst themselves. They were being cautious. Hell, no wonder they were being cautious if they remembered who I was. I was the dick who they believed murdered my dad with my bare hands, the half-sheep bastard who could gate behind you and reach my fingers around your throat and choke your black life out of you. I wondered briefly, as I scrabbled forward as fast as I could, feeling the sharp rocks punch holes in my grabbing hands and scrape long bloody lines along my belly, what they would do to N'zen if they knew _he _had been the one to kill him. I considered stopping to tell them, but decided against it.

And then they were inside the tunnel, after me, their flapping feet echoing down the passage, assaulting my ears before they attacked my body. Damn, what a time to be waxing poetic. I crawled faster, the blackness around me feeling like thick, murky water that slowed me down no matter how hard I strained against it. And then it hit me. I'd been here before.

It was dream, that bloody hell dream. _The dark passage, the rocks under me and above me, blood on my hands as I scrabbled for holds and cracked my nails, the length of chain weighing my legs down, cutting off blood circulation, clattering along behind me and giving me away no matter how much I prayed for it to be quiet. And then the scrabble of many feet, and the grin staring me in the face. _

Thankfully there were no chains here. Not that they were needed. I was making enough gasping and wheezing in real life to alert a deaf boggle with its ears full of mud. Dreams really dramatize like shit. I only hoped fervently it had dramatized that evil grin that would pop out of the darkness in front of me right about now.

Although, now that I knew who it had been, part of me wished it _would _appear, just so I could make that metal mouth do something other than smile. Try scream in terror and pain. Yeah, that worked.

I dragged myself a little faster, my shoulders and my back and my neck all screaming in protest at the odd angle and the pace I was pushing. But with the Auphe behind me and the light at the end of the tunnel in front of me, I wasn't planning on stopping to accommodate my aching muscles.

"_Not that way!" _screamed an Auphe, its voice shattering glass I hadn't known was in my head. That's what it felt like, anyway. A beer bottle imploding and sending shards into the soft tissue of my brain. "_The half-breed will kill you! The half-breed will pull out your teeth one by one and stick them into your own eyes!_" It was speaking in it's own language, all screeches and whining groans, but I could understand what it was saying.

Well, well, my reputation proceeds me. I stopped clawing my way down the passage to listen and see if the Auphe were taking the words of wisdom seriously. Apparently they were, clever bastards. And I didn't pretend not to know who'd given the warning. I felt my insides curdle. What did N'zen want with me? Was it because he wanted to save my life, or because he was planning something else? Something worse . . .

Who was I shitting? He was Auphe, he didn't have the capacity for loyalty. He wanted me for himself, the bastard. _So are you_, I reminded myself. _Half-breed. Half Auphe. You're half of his kind, and yet here you are, right? If this isn't damned loyalty, I don't know what is. _

Well, whatever his motives, N'zen was in over his pointed little demonic head. Saving me from being eaten in a dark crack in the side of a cavern wasn't going to save him from being forced to eat his own heart between two slices of Niko's wheat-free bread. I wasn't won over that quickly.

I kept expecting N'zen to pop out of the darkness and make a jump for me. It would be the perfect time to take me, squashed practically flat by the rocks, hardly able to move my arms, unable to turn around. He obviously wasn't that bright – he didn't attack. Still, that was no reason to put my guard down. Once again I cursed myself for forgetting to bring a weapon. The katana would have been useful just about now, although how I'd manage to drag it along with me, I didn't know.

_Besides, it's doing more good where it is. _I only hoped it was inside an Auphe gullet.

It was getting difficult to breathe. Whether that was because of my newly-discovered claustrophobia or because my lungs were bruised with the constant knocking and slamming against jutting rocks on the stone floor, I didn't know. Didn't care. The light at the end of the tunnel was getting closer, stronger.

"Ready or not, here I come," I grated, then immediately felt sickly Auphe. Wasn't that such a frigging Auphe thing to say? I banished that thought before it could take hold. I did _not _need an identity crisis right now. What I _did _need was to get my frigging ass moving so I got to Niko before N'zen got to me . . .

The floor disappeared beneath me, and I tumbled forward with a hollered curse. I fell fast down the shoot, slamming several times into the narrow tubular walls. I tried to gate, I but I couldn't focus. Shit, every time I began to summon the power to rip a hole in space, I slammed against a wall, striking my head so that pain whited out any concentration I might have had.

Then I landed on something that didn't feel like the rock I had expected to break my fall. It shifted beneath me and I rolled off it onto the ground, breathing hard and staring up at the shoot I'd fallen down, which rose and rose into darkness. My head hurt. Hurt? It ached like hell. And my body felt bruised and broken like the car I'd smashed into the lamppost. Shit.

"My God . . ."

Maybe I should have just stood there and let the police take care of us. I wonder what would have happened if I'd done that, just stood there. _Was that a voice_? If the police had got a hold of our fake IDs, we might have been locked up, where no Auphe could have gotten.

"Cal."

Then we'd sit out the sentence. Of course, prison life wasn't all that great, but shit, at least Niko and I'd still be in our world, waiting on line in the prison cafeteria. _I'm certain I heard a voice_. Did prisons even have cafeterias? Or did they push the tin plates under the cell doors like in all those corny B-rated movies? A piece of dry bread and a tankard of water.

"Say something." And someone was squeezing my arm, gripping my shoulder, touching my forehead. "Damn it, little brother, talk to me."

Familiar voice. Familiar name, Cal. Niko'd only called me Caliban. I think it was because he didn't really forgive me. Unlike this guy who was . . . who was . . .

"_Shit it_!" I shouted, bolting upright and banging heads with Niko, who'd been bending over me. "Nik, Cyrano, that you? It's . . . It's you, right?"

Niko ducked his head down, hiding his face behind a sheet of knotted blond hair that had come loose from the elastic. His shoulders twitched. "I should be . . . asking that question," he rasped, swallowing hard.

I reached over and grabbed him by the chin to angle his head toward me and keep it still while I used my Auphe vision to scan his face. Just to make sure. Gray eyes bright with intelligence and what I guessed were unshed tears, trademark Romanesque beak. His face was bruised and bloody, but it was the face of a man in his early twenties. Stubble pricked my fingers. Damn it, that meant he'd been here at least twelve hours, which was twelve hours too long in my opinion. But twelve hours was better by far than thirteen years.

"I just kept telling myself . . ." Niko began, but I cut him off.

"Shut up and say my name. What's my name?"

"I haven't . . ."

"Just say the frigging name," I gritted. "Who. Am. I?"

"Cal." He half-laughed, half-sobbed with relief and said it again. "You're Cal."

"Not Caliban?"

"Never Caliban." Niko dragged in a congested breath as I dropped my hand from his face to rest on his shoulder. "You know I never call you Caliban."

"Yeah," I grunted, frowning.

"You thought I forgot you?"

"No," I said, maybe too quickly. "I just . . . Never mind." I didn't want to leave. The tiny little room was barely big enough for both of us, it stank like refuse and old blood and the rotting remains of those who had been here before us, and I could feel the fear creeping like a chill down the walls, the fear we'd be discovered. But hell, I still didn't want to leave. I felt like I was still in that damn frigging dream, and if I moved or blinked Niko'd disappear and I'd wake up alone. But there was someone up there that needed my help, help I'd promised to give.

Was he even still there? Now that I'd found this Niko, had the future Niko disappeared, unrealized? I couldn't take that chance. Much as I wanted to make a gate, grab my brother, and run, I had to stay. Shit, promises were bitter bitches, they just kept coming back and biting you in the ass.

Niko bent over, resting his forehead on my shoulder. I brought one arm around his naked shoulders and felt the bunched muscles there, taut and ready for danger . . . or pain. "You shouldn't have come," he muttered. "I would have understood."

_No, Nik, I didn't come and it destroyed you. _"That's bullshit. I'm just as good an ass-saver as you are."

"I know," Niko said, pulling away and tangling his fingers in my hair to give it a tug. "So I have one question for you. What took you so damn _long_?"

I rammed the heel of my hand against his shoulder. "You have no idea, Cyrano. No idea." I stood quickly, realizing what needed to be done. My brain went crazy – I'd forgotten about the ache while sitting down and I'd gotten up too damn quick. It felt like two rabid porcupines were doing a few rounds in there. I staggered, bringing my arm up to rest my forehead in its crook.

Niko reached out and gripped my elbow, sighing long-sufferingly. "I leave you alone for one day and you have another concussion."

"Shut up," I muttered, getting my balance back and lowering my arm to stare at him. I needed to know one more thing before I sent him back. Call me insecure, but I still couldn't believe this was the Niko I'd been looking for, for literally years."Nik, what is the difference between induction and deduction?"

Niko's lips quirked. "You want a lesson in rhetoric . . . now?"

"Nik, just answer the question," I said, surprised at the tiredness in my voice. Hell, I sounded older than him. And technically, I was, in a way. I'd been a frigging thirty-four year old today. All this warped time paradoxes were beginning to hurt my head worse than the concussion.

"I suppose it's the least I can do in recompense," Nik smiled. Wait, back up, Niko _smiled_. God, now _that _was a good sight. I was tempted to close my eyes so it was the last thing I saw before I died fighting to save the Niko who didn't smile, the Niko who _couldn't _smile. So it was sappy, so bite me. "Induction is a conclusion based on probability and drawn from experience. Deduction is purely logic-based and so eliminates probability."

"Thank you," I breathed, and opened the gate behind me, envisioning the parking garage. It tore open behind me with the howl of core wind. Niko's eyes widened and I turned slowly to make sure I was opening it to the right place and not accidentally dumping him in Goodfellow's bedroom – not that I knew what the inside of that looked like . . . or wanted to.

It was the right place. Damn it, I was good when I knew what I was doing. I'd opened it exactly at the second I'd left. Promise was standing there, looking almost as though she were in the cell with us, eyes wide with shock and her hand outstretched. Shit, just like I'd imagined it as I'd tumbled into Tumulus. It was totally freakish, she was completely still, trapped in that one moment. The moment Niko stepped through to reach for her hand, their world would continue, the gate would shut, and me? Well, I'd probably die. But for some reason that didn't strike me as too important.


	20. Thicker Than Water

_A/N: Okay, so I said Tuesday or Wednesday. XD btw, how many of you think that Justin Chatwin from Steven Spielburg's War of the Worlds would be an awesome Cal? (not perfect, but just about as close as they could get). I am in favor of this, with Ben Barnes with blond hair as Niko (don't hit me). XD_

**TWENTY**

**Thicker Than Water**

"Go on," I motioned toward the gate. I was tired, and the image was flickering, the edges of the gate itself spiking and fading and flaring. I was too fatigued to keep this thing open for more than a few minutes. Niko didn't move. "Nik, go on, just run for it, I'll be right behind you."

_The other you. _

"You're a bad liar, Cal."

"Shit, Niko, just _gate _already, will you? Like, right now? Because I'm going to lose it soon . . ." Promise stood there, long slender fingers outstretched. Silent. Pleading. She blinked out of existence and then back in again. "Nik, _now! Please! _Just take her hand, just take her damn – "

I was forced to let the gate go. My control disappeared instantly and the gate vanished, closing like an automatic sliding door, shutting Promise out. Shutting us out. I turned to Nik and glared at him. "You are _such _an asshole, why didn't you just take the frigging _jump_?"

"Because you weren't going to go with me."

"But . . . you could have been . . ." Damn it, these Nikos were really getting to me. They just did not listen to reason. Shit, you told one not to come and he comes. You tell the other to go and he stays. Maybe I should start learning reverse psychology. "Damn it, Niko, you're such a bastard." The last word was smothered as Niko pulled me into a hard hug. Not a macho, arm-slung-over-the-shoulder man-hug. An honest-to-goodness, both-arms-all-the-way-around, body-against-body hug. I didn't struggle. My brother had been through a lot today, he needed the physical contact. Hell, who was I kidding, _I _needed the physical contact.

"Why weren't you going to go with me?" Niko demanded angrily, his mouth right up against my ear.

"There's someone else who needs my help," I told him. "Up there. He helped me get to you. I promised I'd go back for him." I pushed away from him then.

"Someone _helped _you?" Niko was intrigued. "Human?"

"Yeah." I scrubbed my face with my hands. "He held off the Auphe while I made a break to reach you."

Niko bowed his head. "Then I need to meet him so I can offer my thanks." I was about to object – no _way _I was going through _that _ordeal – but Niko had swept something from the ground and my voice died a swift and painless death in my throat. His katana. The sight of it, newly oiled and slick and sharp, put a rock in my stomach. I groaned internally. With what I had gone through today, even if I managed to get back to my own world in one piece, my brain was going bye-bye, no shit. "Let's go." He paused. "Let me guess. You didn't bring a weapon when you dove to my rescue. Whatever happened to that caution I remember trying to pound into your sorry excuse for a brain?"

I grimaced, and I was glad his eyes weren't as good as mine. That was just too frigging weird. "Yeah, so bite me. After we get back. I have a feeling there are enough mouths that are dying to take a chunk out of me at the moment without adding you to the list."

"How are we getting up there?" Niko demanded, craning his neck back to stare up at the nonexistent ceiling. "I've tried scaling the walls, but there's nothing that could even pass for handholds." He flexed his fingers, which I could see now were torn and bloody from attempting to climb up. I quickly banished that mental image from my mind and concentrated on building up my power. "I think I have enough juice for one more gate. I know where I fell. I can take us back to the passage."

Niko frowned, but nodded. He didn't want to go slithering back through that claustrophobia-inducing passage again any more than I did. I couldn't blame him – my trip through it must have been shit in comparison to his. At least I'd been alone in the passage, not goaded on in front and behind by monsters herding me to an unknown destination . . . On second thoughts, it would save a hell of a lot of time if I could just gate right back to where I'd left the other Niko. It'd be a little more of a drain on my strength, but I could handle it.

I reached out and gripped his arm. "Right. We skip the passage. But we're probably going to be coming out in the middle of the action, then, so ready with the blade."

"If it's going to be too much of a drain . . ."

"We skip the passage," I said again. "I personally have no desire to go worming back through the bowels of the frigging mountain either. Don't sweat it, I've got us covered. Just, like I said, ready with the blade. If you die or pull any of that kind of shit, I'll kill you."

"Your threat strikes fear into my very being," Niko said dryly. "Don't worry, little brother. If I die, I'll kill _myself_."

I closed my eyes and dug deep inside to find those last threads of supernatural power that festered inside of me. I'd just gotten my psychological fingers into the fragments when Niko spoke again.

"The Auphe that brought me here."

I opened my eyes again. "Yeah?" Oh, shit, I knew what was coming.

"He said things that I'd rather not repeat, but from what I heard . . . Cal, was it your brother?" The word was stumbled over, like it was a private thing he didn't know if he had the right to be talking about.

"Apparently Pop didn't have a problem with bigamy," I grunted. "Yeah, N'zen is my . . . you know." Hell, I didn't want to say it, either. It felt as awkward as if I were stripping down in front of Robin.

"N'zen." Niko rolled the name around on his tongue. "That was the name."

"The name."

"The one you were saying in your sleep," Niko's voice was taut. "That night after we dispatched the worm."

"Yeah," I sighed. "I'd been having nightmares about that bastard for several weeks now. Apparently they were memories resurfacing. Nik, according to Darkling . . ." I felt his arm under my hand go hard and tense. ". . . I killed my own dad with my bare hands while escaping from Tumulus." I don't know why I'd never told him, I guess the idea of confessing patricide was a slightly uncomfortable one.

"Good for you," Niko affirmed, conveying in no uncertain terms that that put any kind of a damper on his opinion of me. Shit, I was a lucky bastard. How many people could spring something like that on their companion and still walk away with their relationship intact?

"Apparently, it wasn't me. It was N'zen. He helped me escape."

Niko was silent for a moment. "Why?"

"He never said – exactly. But blood runs thicker than water and all that shit. If he weren't Auphe, I'd take a shot at guessing that maybe he'd done it because . . ." We were family. That was what I didn't want to say. N'zen had dragged Niko here, he'd put him here, caused him this pain, hell, the freaking thing was an Auphe. I didn't want Niko to see N'zen in me.

"Maybe it is possible," Niko said quietly. "The Auphe are without doubt capable of emotion, if generally ones like bloodlust and hatred. But they love their homeland – I was there when Darkling opened the gate into the past. And apparently they also feel some sort of affiliation for their own kind. Maybe . . ."

And I knew exactly why he was doing this, going through this monologue on the possible merits of the Auphe nature when all he'd ever wanted to do was disembowel them. Because N'zen was directly related to me, and if Niko said that _he_ was incapable of loyalty or love, then it would be tantamount to saying that _I_ was, as well. How could one guy be so smart and so damn blind all at once?

"Niko," I said, facing him squarely and gripping both his shoulders. "Shut up."

"But, Cal, if he . . ."

"Listen, you asshole, the Auphe are monsters. We let ourselves forget that, we're screwed. N'zen took you away from me, Cyrano, and he knew _exactly _what that meant. No one who loved me would do that."

"I would have taken you away from N'zen had I found you after five years."

"So now you're frigging _identifying _with him?" I demanded.

"What? _No_, Cal, I'm just . . ."

"Trying to make excuses for him because you don't want to think of me as associated – frigging _related _– to something without the capacity for loyalty." I found myself putting my hand to the back of his neck, the familiar touch of reassurance that he'd always offered to me. "But I'm _here,_ right? Hell, Nik, if you knew what I went through to frigging _get _here . . . I'm not all Auphe, believe me. Now cut it out. I've got Leandros blood in my veins, too. Defend _that _part of me, not the damn shitting Auphe part."

Niko sighed. "You're diplomatic, I'll give you that."

"Whassat mean?" I joked, releasing him and stepping back a step. "I don't know why we're even having this conversation. We've got a man to save."

"You know he probably didn't survive," Niko said quietly. "Taking on a host of Auphe even at top condition is strenuous. And this guy couldn't have been primed."

"No, he wasn't," I sighed, thinking of my shaking, tortured brother, breathlessly begging me not to leave him. "But I have to make sure, I can't just abandon him." I saw Niko's lips quirk, and I laughed at myself. "There, see? The Leandros prevaileth. And you worried about my frigging loyalty genes."

I built the gate, and it came easier than I'd expected. I gripped my brother and built it around us, and the tight, cold walls enclosing us dropped away and we fell into empty space.

We came out in the sloping passage where I'd parted with the other Nik. Four Auphe were still there, huddled against the wall like they were taking a time out. I didn't see the future Niko there, and wondered briefly if he'd run away. But that was post-gating disorientation talking, because the second the ground stopped spinning under my feet and the Auphe looked up with red eyes and redder mouths, I realized what had happened. I saw what they were congregated on top of, and I saw the calloused and emaciated hand stretched out from under their shuffling, pasty bodies as though reaching in one last desperate struggle.

For a minute I forgot that Niko was behind me, whole and breathing. It didn't matter that the other Niko was from the future, someone who didn't remember me, someone who'd chosen others over me, someone who called me by my monster name. He had still been my brother. And the Auphe were frigging eating him. In that moment, Niko was dead.

I don't know exactly what I was screaming. I think it was Auphe. Whatever it was, it was ripping from a part of me so primal that the Auphe's red eyes showed tangible fear. I rushed at them, the warning shout from behind lost on me. The first Auphe snapped at me with teeth covered in Niko's blood, but I just grabbed it around the neck and, ignoring the flailing talons that raked my face and chest, I snapped it's head back. I hadn't killed it – it took hell to kill an Auphe – but I'd incapacitated it for the time being at least. That was all I was worried about. Getting them off my brother.

I was wrestling a second, its teeth sinking into my shoulder, before I had time to blink. I was all but lying on top of it as I attempted to get my fingers around its twisting neck. I felt its heaving belly against mine, swollen with the flesh and blood of my brother, and I abandoned the traditional stranglehold to grip it's throat – my fingers coated by a gate – and pull it from it's neck. It screamed and I screamed right back in its face.

Its red eyes went dead and black and a strong arm wrapped around my chest and pulled me off of the dead monster. I broke free from the restraining grip, vaguely registering that the other two Auphe had been decapitated and I hadn't done it, and dropped in front of Niko's body.

His face was gone, along with most of the rest of him. His hair was still there, tangled golden strands matted with gore. I didn't touch it. My eyes went to his empty hand, bereft of his weapon. I found myself wondering if he'd lost the katana in the fight or dropped it in fear when he found himself alone with the creatures who'd broken him. I wanted him to have lost it in the fight, and somehow I knew that's what had happened.

I don't know how long I sat with my hands, blackened with Auphe blood, raised and spread over the body, unsure what to do, where to hold him without breaking him. Someone knelt beside me, and a hand reached around my shoulders and pushed my face to the side, away from the sight.

"Breathe," came the order.

"He can't," I said dully, still not registering.

"But you're going to."

"Don't want to."

There was a pause. "Cal, what the hell is wrong with you?"

I looked up at the sound of my name, the blackness clearing from my brain. "Nik."

"I'm here, Cal."

And he was there, suddenly, and the body in front of me lost the aura of murderous despair that had surrounded it only seconds before. I closed my eyes, latching onto the lifeline of my brother kneeling beside me, living and breathing, blocking out everything else. "God," I croaked. "Nik, where'd you go?"

"I was right here," he said tensely. "I was right here the whole time."

"Don't you ever disappear on me again," I said, and I was completely serious.

Niko allowed me a moment of silence to gather my thoughts before asking again. "Who was he, Cal?"

I glanced over at the body. The face was gone, yeah, but the hair, the hands . . . Couldn't Niko see he was looking at himself? But then again, I guessed it's the same with monsters roaming New York. Blissful oblivion to those who didn't know enough to look twice. I didn't know how to break that oblivion to Nik without breaking myself or breaking him. Instead of answering, I got up shakily and began hunting around the passage.

"What are you doing?" Niko tried very desperately to trust my actions as often as he could, I knew, but he obviously thought I'd gone off the deep end by the tone of his voice now. "Cal, what in hell are you doing?" Not that I blamed him.

"Looking for something."

I found it, the katana, by the wall several yards away. As I knew it would be, it was covered in black blood, surrounded by minced Auphe corpses. Niko came up behind me as I picked it up and ran a finger down the gore that streamed, half-dry, down the scarred blade.

"He said he was able," I whispered.

"Abel?" Niko frowned, obviously thinking I meant it was his name.

I gripped the sword, showing it to him. "This was his."

"A katana," Niko recognized the type of weapon instantly. He motioned to the dead Auphe. "He obviously knew what he was doing." He glanced back at the body. "I would have liked to thank him."

"Thank N'zen," hissed a new voice from above us. Niko and I looked up to see N'zen hanging on the ceiling above us like a spider, grinning. "N'zen calls brothers and sisters away from Caliban. Lets Caliban go free."

"You," Niko growled through his teeth, edging in front of me.

N'zen smiled, showing needle teeth that were stained red. I didn't have to be a frigging genius to figure out whose blood it was, either. "You came," he said delightedly, looking at me. "N'zen knew it. He _knew_ and you _did_." Then he frowned exaggeratedly like a monkey. "But who did Caliban bring with him? The tasty one, the one who tastes like the man with the steel?"

I lunged for him with the blood-blackened blade, but N'zen gated and appeared behind us, this time squatting on the ground. He licked his fingers. "Caliban will have fun stories to tell N'zen."

"I'm not telling you any damn stories," I rasped, Niko's grip on my shirt holding me back from charging again.

"What is it you want?" Niko demanded, his sword extended. I looked at them, my two half-brothers facing off, and wondered why in hell Nik wasn't simply charging the bastard or letting me. Why was he _asking _him frigging _questions_?

Because N'zen was my brother.

"What do you want?" Niko demanded a second time, louder, and I could feel his restrained anger trembling in his hand as it gripped my shirt. He was holding himself in check, but barely, stopping himself from attacking something that was half-me.

N'zen gave a shrill whistle and immediately more red eyes appeared in the darkness on both sides of the passage. Frigging backup. "N'zen wants his brother."


	21. A Brother For A Brother

_A/N: Thanks for being patient! Here's the final chapter. Enjoy!_

**TWENTY ONE **

**A Brother For A Brother**

"No shit," I growled at N'zen, who blinked lazily at me, like what I had to say about this didn't make a frigging bit of difference. I was just the property in dispute. No one listens to the property.

The Auphe turned to Niko, whose face had – impossibly – hardened further into a mask of stone. "Go to hell," he said placidly, his grip tightening on my shirt.

"Already here," N'zen smiled, walking forward on all fours like a cat getting ready to spring. "And we will _stay _here. Caliban will grow old with N'zen. N'zen will discipline Caliban, make sure he never runs away from home again. Make him a good little Aupheling. You, steel wielder, will rot into bones and be fed to our pupae so they will be strong enough to take back what was theirs."

Like hell that was going to happen. I was getting ready to build another gate. It was torture, like exercising a pulled muscle. I wasn't strong enough, and there was no guarantee that Nik and I would come out in the right place or come out at all, but anywhere, I figured, was better than here. Niko knew what I was doing, he could read it in the tenseness of my muscles, and he edged closer so our shoulders were pressed together. Getting ready for the jump.

N'zen, whose eyes had been unfocused, probably reveling in visions of my brother's bloody end and my eternal imprisonment, suddenly snapped back to attack mode. He felt the energy inside of me begin seeping out in cold gray light. The other Auphe down the passage, waiting for their cue like eager little walk-on actors in a battle scene, began buzzing and chittering nervously amongst themselves. They could sense it, as well. The boy who was not human or demon was building a gate, using their power against them.

Niko threw one arm around my shoulders, the other still extended with his katana pointed at N'zen. Physical contact was necessary. If Niko and I were separated in the few seconds of tumbling through a rip in the universe, who knew where he'd end up? I imagined him losing his grip on me and falling away, out of the gate, and slid my arm around his shoulders to keep the contact doubly as strong.

"Stop, Caliban!" shrieked N'zen, red eyes going wide with panic and anger as I wrapped my brother and myself in the macabre glow.

I smiled at N'zen as a raw, howling wind ripped through my hair. Always bowing out gracefully, that's me. Whether it's a kick in the ass, a knife in the back, or a grin as I disappeared into nothingness, I always made sure to leave with style.

The Auphe jumped for us, N'zen in the lead, screaming angrily, claws outstretched, metal teeth – stained with Niko's blood – bared, ready to sink into my brother a second time. Not likely.

_Come on already, damn it! _I squeezed every ounce of strength into creating the rip in space, but my reservoir of whatever the hell made me able to travel was rapidly running out. And the Auphe were still coming.

"Now would be a good time," Niko said quietly.

"You think?" I rasped, and pushed harder.

Something popped inside me. Red warmth gushed suddenly from my nose and rose in my throat. I gagged on it, struggling to keep my concentration. And the gate was completed.

Niko and I disappeared just as the Auphe from either end of the tunnel coalesced where we'd been a split second before. Listen to me, getting all literary and shit, now of all times, too. What started out as a good thing ended as a very bad thing, however, because somehow N'zen – that little piece of Auphe shit – managed to jump into the gate and attach himself onto me even as we were blinking out of their existence.

I'd never had to fight off an attacker in mid-travel before. It wasn't a very damn pleasant experience, either. It was like moving underwater. My brain – scrambled into one of Niko's stupid soy milkshakes – couldn't be bothered with things like coordination and precision. It was occupied with more important things, like finding the gate at the other end. Besides, both hands were occupied. One was still holding the katana, and the other was holding onto Nik, and shit if I'd let go of either.

N'zen hung on, burying his teeth in my neck. I tried pounding him on the head with the pommel of the katana's rubber grip, but like I said, my brain wasn't exactly playing along. I missed his head twice, succeeding in cuffing him on the shoulder blade and once missing altogether. I could feel the blood on my shirt, soaking threw it, running down my stomach and soaking my waistband. Shit, if he reached the jugular vein or the carotid artery, I was done for.

I know it was only seconds in the gate, but it felt like forever. Time screws up when you've got a monster's teeth embedded in your throat. Thankfully, that little Auphe GPS of mine took over once again, since the rest of me was pretty much preoccupied with the thought of bleeding to death. I didn't land us in the parking garage. My little internal Smartphone took us right back to maximum security – our apartment.

We crashed through the window and landed on the ground in a bed of shattered glass. All three of us. The minute I was out of the gate, my cognitive functions kicked back in and I jabbed the katana into N'zen's side in a last desperate attempt to get the damn thing off me. It worked – or at least it loosened his hold while Niko picked N'zen up from behind like some kind of rabid animal and threw him against the far wall.

Through a red fog caused by a happy and effective combo of after-travelling fatigue, a bruised brain, and blood pouring down my front, I saw my Auphe brother flop limply to the ground. I more than half expected Niko to go over and finish him off. It was the logical thing to do. But who said Niko was logical when it came to me? Little brother bleeding to death on the floor took priority – damn him. It was a mistake, as we were to find out.

Niko, dropping his katana within easy reach, grabbed my blood-soaked collar and tore my shirt open to better inspect the wound. There wasn't much pain yet – a vague stinging that promised to get a lot worse. Just blood. Lots of that dark sticky red shit that made my body function. And I was losing it, fast.

"Shit . . ." I gasped, the pain exploding as Niko ran his fingers along the leaking bite marks.

"The carotid and the jugular are intact," he breathed. He glanced up, then levered himself up to grab a pillow off the fifteen-year-old couch. He pressed it against my neck to stop the blood flow. "It's not like the upholstery could look any worse," he said breathlessly. He ran a bloody hand over my forehead, pulling away strands of hair away from my eyes. "Keep this pressed hard on the wound."

N'zen was up.

"Nik . . ."

"Don't talk, damn it, just press," Niko reached over for his katana. Too late.

N'zen jumped on Niko's back, scrabbling for a hold, long black talons punching through his sweat-slicked shoulder blades. With a grunt – a pretty big display of emotion for the silent killer, Niko reached over his own shoulder, grabbed N'zen by the wispy hair, and dragged the Auphe off him, flipping N'zen onto his back.

His katana stabbed the ground where N'zen had been a second ago. N'zen himself gated to the far end of the room. His side was bleeding black blood on the floor, and he was limping, licking his teeth to clean them of the Leandros brothers cocktail that currently stained them. "What right?" N'zen continued, rasping out his broken glass syllables as he pawed his way in a mewling circle in the corner by the TV. "What right do you have? Caliban is mine. My little brother."

_Nik, just kill him now and shut him up. _The words hurt worse than the bite. I didn't _want _to be associated with him. And what could he want with me, if he just tried to rip my throat out? I squirmed on the floor, tried to open my mouth to say something, tell the Auphe to go away, shut up, get the hell out. Niko said it for me. In three words. That bastard was always more eloquent than me.

"Caliban," Niko enunciated coldly, using my full name to get the point across to N'zen, "is _mine._"

My human brother and my Auphe brother went at it again. I watched, my grip on the battered katana tightening. It was like watching a reincarnation of the fight that went on inside me daily, the human and the Auphe battling for the upper hand. But in those fights I never was sure which side would win. This fight, I was sure. Niko might have been subjected to the Auphe for a day. He might have been beaten up, tortured, dumped in a cell, left without food or water in a cramped dark space not fit to piss in, but he was still Niko.

N'zen gated back and forth around the room, appearing on the wall, on the ceiling, like a frigging fly. Just get me a flyswatter. A damn big one. Niko intercepted him at every turn, twisting and twirling like some kind of lethal ballet dancer. With a big shiny weapon. He stayed far enough away from the Auphe so that N'zen couldn't form another gate around them and dump Niko back into Tumulus. N'zen lost fingers, a leg, half his face to the katana's whipping blade. Auphe bits and pieces scattered on the floor with the shattered glass and the black and red blood.

And then N'zen slowed down. Apparently even Auphe could only gate so many times before getting hit by the massive wave of fatigue I felt every time. Being all cut up and bleeding in half a dozen places probably didn't do too much for his stamina, either. He gated a final time, landing on top of me.

"Caliban," N'zen whistled painfully through metal teeth. His nails dug into my chest as he bent close.

"Get away from him . . ." Niko began, jumping forward to decapitate the Auphe.

"Cyrano, wait," I grated.

"Cal, he'll . . ."

"Just _wait_."

Niko fell back, breathing heavily. I could feel him standing, ready for an attack, right behind my head. N'zen, however, didn't seem to be interested in any more attacks. He just stared at me and breathed, his claws digging a little deeper.

I looked deep into the bloody orbs of his eyes – and shit, doesn't that sound romantic? – and I saw my brother in there. No, not N'zen. I saw my thirty-six year old brother, broken and bloody and dying. The Niko I didn't save. For a moment, all the helpless despair I had felt when I'd seen his body in the tunnel came back, and – unmanly though it was – tears burned my nose. N'zen knew what I was seeing. He grinned. He thought he'd won this round.

No. Damn. Shit.

I felt Niko's katana, heavy and hot and pulsing, in my hand. And I was going to use it.

_An eye for an eye_, I thought, as I lifted the katana and placed it under N'zen's chin. The Auphe tensed but didn't move away or fight it. I don't know if he was just giving up or didn't think I could do it. I'd been in this position once before, before the whole crazy shitting adventure, and I'd backed away. Not this time.

_A tooth for a tooth. _

I pressed the blade with a sudden strength and swiftness that I didn't think I had left inside of me. N'zen's eyes widened and I cracked a bloody grin. Like I'd said, not this time.

_A brother for a brother. _

N'zen's head rolled away across the floor as his body fell limp on top of me, pumping scalding black blood into my face from the stump of a neck. I choked on it, felt it filling up my nose and mouth with a sick copper tang. Niko kicked the body off me and dragged me into a sitting position, using his hand to wipe the gore from my face and clear my nose. I vomited blood onto his chest, the action tearing at the bite wounds in my neck.

He picked up the pillow I'd dropped and pressed it against my neck again. "I told you to hold the damn thing," he snapped, applying pressure that sent the pain throbbing into my head. I could feel the drain on my body seeping strength from my limbs. I thought that now would be a good time to die peacefully. In my apartment, in the present time, with my brother. "Open your eyes right now," Niko ordered me, and I realized I'd let them droop closed.

"Sorry," I croaked. "I'm a little tired."

"Don't even think about it." Niko repositioned himself behind me so he could reach around me and could more easily apply pressure while I leaned back against him. I could feel him tense up, the scenario too familiar.

"It's okay . . . I'm not going . . . anywhere," I assured him, one hand still clutching the katana.

"I know," Niko answered, not because of the faith he had in my words, but because he wouldn't _let _me. "I promised myself that years ago."

There was a silence. I stared at N'zen's body, the mutilated head, the black blood. It hurt to talk, but I had to ask. "Nik."

"Mm?" Niko rested his chin on top of my head and breathed out heavily.

"If I hadn't come for you right away . . ." I began, then rephrased the question. "You know I'd never just leave you in Tumulus, right? I mean, you'd know – even if it looked like I wasn't coming – that I was trying." I don't know why I was bringing this up again. I knew Niko would deny losing faith in me even if I knew he would. Maybe that's all I wanted to hear. Or maybe I wanted to make sure that if something like that ever happened again, he'd know.

"You must be delirious," Niko told me solemnly.

"I'd come."

"I know."

He knew. _This _Niko knew, even if the other one hadn't. And it was the most I could do. I glanced down at the weapon I had laid over my knees. That, and maybe take care of his katana. He'd have appreciated that.

"Can you teach me how to use this thing?" I asked, hefting the weapon.

"You're not even supposed to be talking, you know."

"Seriously . . ."

"Shut up, Cal."

"Stop bitching, already. Can you?"

"If you don't stop talking . . ."

"You're just scared shitless I'll be better at it than you."

"In your dreams."

"Then?"

"I've been _trying _to teach you swordsmanship for years. You lack motivation."

Lacking no longer. I had a feeling my Desert Eagle was going to have to cough up its place as priority weapon. "I promise I'll be a good student. And I'll eat my vegetables."

That clinched it.


	22. Epilogue: Paradox

_A/N: And because Niko could never be anybody's fool . . . _

**EPILOGUE**

**Paradox**

I was sweating, my sword arm aching from two hours of constant and racking use. "Taking five," I gasped, mopping at my face and stumbling into a corner of the dojo. It was a weekend and Niko and I had the room to ourselves. Which was a plus, as he was pretty much slicing my ass six different ways and doing everything but rolling it into strips of seaweed and serving it as frigging sushi.

Niko fell into a meditative posture beside me, legs folded Indian-style underneath him, hands resting on his knees. "This means a lot to you, doesn't it?" he asked after a minute.

I paused, glancing at my katana, which was still scratched but polished free of stains and rust. He had no idea. "Yeah."

"Hmm." He sighed, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes. "I'm sure I'd appreciate it."

It took a minute to sink in. "What the . . . wait, what the _hell_ . . ."

"Honestly, I'm not a brainless ass, Cal, I know what my own katana looks like," Niko laughed. "An unidentified man who survived Tumulus and bothered to help you? You going into a fit of hysterics when you find him dead? You polish a strangely familiar sword to death when before I had to chain you to the kitchen tables to get you to reload your Glock. You don't think I'd piece it together?"

"How long did you know?"

Niko sighed. "Almost the whole time. I started suspecting immediately, when you wouldn't tell me the guy's name. The avidity with which you're pursuing this education in the art of swordsmanship, not to mention the conscientious ingesting of vegetables as promised, solidified my suspicions." Niko squeezed my shoulder. "You're a good brother, Cal. I should have trusted you."

I glanced over at him. "How'd you know you didn't . . ."

Niko rolled his eyes. "Your constant assurances that you'd – and I quote – 'never leave me in Tumulus', 'never desert me', 'always try to get to me' – and so forth, clued me in to a certain extent."

I laughed sheepishly. "Yeah. I guess I did get kind of sappy and shit right after that whole N'zen thing." Niko was usually the one doing the whole vow-of-loyalty thing, not me. Not before, anyway. "But I had to be sure you knew."

"Whatever happened, whatever I thought," Niko looked at me intently, "it was _my _fault. _My _shortcoming. I _should _have trusted you. I _should _have waited patiently, no matter how long it took. I don't want you to blame yourself for my lack of faith." He paused. "And I promise you, Cal, that I won't ever let that happen again."

"Technically, it didn't even happen once," I corrected half-heartedly. Niko was taking the responsibility again. "And quit it with the all-my-fault shit. It was just as much my fault, if not more. I was the stupid ass who jumped through a gate without waiting to check the calendar. I was the one who made you wait thirteen years. I'm sick and tired of you taking all the responsibility. Cut yourself a little slack."

Niko quirked a smile. "That's what comes with being the eldest brother."

"Well," I smirked, getting back to my feet and picking up my katana. "_Technically_, I'm older than you. Thirteen years older. So cut it out."

"How fortuitous," Niko said dryly. "Perhaps I can give you a few lessons on how a little brother is supposed to act."

My big brother who was now in a way my little brother due to traveling back in time to meet my even _older _older brother smiled slightly and got up from the ground and hefted his own weapon, assuming a fighting pose while I struggled against a headache that paradox threatened to bring on. Time really was a bitch.

**THE END**

_A/N: Thank you so much for reading this fanfic! Your reviews and faithfulness throughout the duration of this project have been what's kept me going. I appreciate it and you. :) And now I'm going to write a beautifully short and plot-free fanfic about the Leandros brothers. They deserve some time off just to be boys. I think a picnic in Central Park would be a good idea, don't you? . . . Maybe I'll invite Robin, Promise, and Delilah along for the ride. ;P _


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